Major update to Spartan Athletics approved

After a bit of a marathon effort, version 1.1 of Spartan Athletics is now available in the app store.

Now, I'm just the coder for this project, but if I was the owner I'd have called it version 2.0 at least, because a lot has changed since the original version.

It now has all ten events available, as well as bluetooth multiplayer support and a whole heap of improvements and bug fixes.

But getting it approved was not easy. A while ago I updated my 3GS to iOS 4.3 without thinking, and of course that meant that I had to update XCode to 4.0 to be able to build to device. Only then did I realise that perhaps this wasn't the smartest move after looking at the growing number of threads about the problems people were having.

One major problem was that the plug-in I used for bluetooth was definitely not compatible with Xcode 4.0. I used Prime31's 'GameKit Bluetooth/WiFi and Voice Chat' plugin. That runs some magic little scripts when you build in Unity to set up the Xcode project and they were broken. But, due to the awesomeness of Mr Prime31's service, after a quick message on twitter I was sent a beta of a 4.0 compatible version of the plugin.

So all seemed good, and the plethora of ad-hoc builds I'd done using Xcode 4.0 all worked fine, on iOS from 4.2.1 to 4.3.1 and iPod touch, iPad and iPhone. So we submit it to Apple and pretty soon get a rejection letter.

We found that your app failed to launch on iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3.1.

We encountered the issue when selecting the application on the Home screen - the app displayed a launch image then quit unexpectedly. This may be because iOS 4 uses a watchdog timer for applications; if an application takes too long to complete its initial startup, the operating system terminates the application. 

For information about the watchdog timer, please see Technical Q&A: Application does not crash when launched from debugger but crashes when launched by user..

Another possibility could be a missing entitlement. For more information, please see the Technical Note: Resolving "0x800003A", applications not launching and "missing entitlement".

For discrete code-level questions, you may wish to consult with Apple Developer Technical Support. Depending on your questions, be sure to include any symbolicated crash logs, screenshots, or steps to reproduce the issues you’ve encountered.

To appeal this review, please submit a request to the App Review Board

I had no idea what was wrong, and the documents that Apple linked to were not very helpful. But, I figured that maybe I had messed up in the signing process and used the wrong distribution profile or something. So I re-did it carefully and tried again. Nup, still rejected.

Then we finally found this thread on the Unity forums. Luckily I still had the Xcode 3.2 installer. So I installed that and re-build in Unity with the target SDK set to 4.2 and re-submitted.

Success.

Bloody hell Apple, you sure don't make it easy for us developers. Between the provisioning profile clusterf*ck, the insanely diffucult iOS downgrade process and the almost five gig Xcode downloads for even miniscule version updates, the world of Android development is looking better and better. 

But you're still where the money is... and that's why we love you.

Comments

[Camington]

An all too familiar story - the lengths Apple goes to to maintain quality control I guess.