I’ve been watching the recent furore over Apple’s iPhone app review process with some concern. Partly, of course, I want the process to be clear, to make sense and to provide us all with good access to the apps we want. But the slightly more selfish reason was that I was waiting for the Greenbelt app to be approved for sale, hoping fervently that it would make it through in time for people to buy it before the festival.
With a little under 6 days to go, it was approved, appearing for sale on Saturday night. What’s more, they tell me they expedited the process in response to a pleading email earlier in the week, to help us meet our target.
I can’t take credit for the coding, which belongs entirely to pab. I played around with some of the code, tidied up a little javascript and provided some feedback, but he did all the hard development (and data entry) work. My role was managing the release and dealing with Apple. The app upload system is far from their finest UI work (it probably ranks amongst the worst apple interfaces I’ve used) but all in all the process worked well for us. The one rejection we did get early in the process was for a fairly clear bug that we quickly fixed.
There’s a lot more we’d like to add to the app, but it’s hugely satisfying to have it out there and it’ll be interesting to see how it affects peoples’ habits at the festival.