I finally uploaded my first build of Mancala to TestFlight. I can get up to 10,000 public testers and I don’t think I can handle that amount of feedback on my own, so I will limit it to my coworkers, friends and family at first.
I actually thought I had uploaded it on Friday and expected Apple not to evaluate it until after the weekend, so I didn’t check the results until Saturday. That was when I realized it failed again because of an automatic validation concerning the screen orientation (my app is landscape only) on the iPad. I decided to just forget iPads and only offer the app for iPhone. Bingo. It passed, and now I had to wait for the next validation to complete.
The validations take a while but not as long as I expected. Now, I am not actually sure in TestFlight your app is code-reviewed by a real person because it happens so fast. So by Tuesday I checked the status again and found that it had been automatically rejected for another reason having to do with cryptography export compliance. All I had to do was set a property in my app.json about that, which was simple because my app has nothing to do with cryptography directly. All the networking is handled by Apple’s Game Center which would handle it through TLS I assume.
If my app used cryptography it would need to fall under the ‘exempt’ category to be legally downloaded outside the US. I would have needed to get an exemption from Apple in the form of an App Encryption Export Compliance Code.
I had been promoting the release on social media and that morning I sent out invitations to all my coworkers. About an hour after it was uploaded I got my first crash report from my sister! Her report said “the game was over and I clicked on Menu to get the next game started. Crashed instead of displaying the Menu.” I frantically started debugging and quickly found that an index out-of-bounds exception was thrown when the game ended. Rookie mistake! I was too excited to get the build uploaded that I forgot to thoroughly test recent changes I made.
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