A simple question that requires an immediate answer. My developer program (for ios) is going to expire in a few days time. I still have 2 Incident supports left from apple.
My questions are
1) I am going to release one more app in a few days time and generally it takes week or two to get approval. If my developer program gets over before the approval; will it gets published?? assuming that its free from bugs.
2) if not what can I do ? want to use the incident anyways.
ps: I will not be able to join the program for some time since I do not have money left.
appreciate your time. thanks
If your developer program expires, your app will not be available for download (see https://developer.apple.com/support/renewal/).
If you want to sell apps via the app store then you will have to wait until you renew your developer program.
Found answer to question 2 so reposting it so that it may be useful to others searching the same.
If i renew my membership before it expires, will my TSI gets carry forwarded? ? i means 2 + 2 ?
Apple Developer Program and Apple Developer Enterprise Program
Included with each enrollment are two Technical Support Incidents, which will expire at the end of your membership year. You will receive two new TSIs when you renew your membership.
more information here: https://developer.apple.com/support/technical/
Related
Several years ago I released an app (a free game) for iOS, which was largely unsucessful, settling to around an average of 5 downloads a month (terrible, I know). However, I recently happend to notice a huge (relatively) spike in downloads, up to around 300 downloads over the last 10 days.
Something seems strange about this latest batch of downloads however, for one thing they are all from China (My app is only localized for English, and never marketed outside the U.S.), and the "Active devices (opt-in only)" statistic shows 3 devices used over that same time period.
Even stranger, the "Product Page Views" statistic shows only 6 views over this same period that had 300 downloads?!
Is something nefarious going on, or might there be a benign explanation for this huge spike in downloads?
If anyone is curious, or if it helps find the cause, the app is Acorn Mayhem, as found here. (Note: this is not intended as self promotion, and if including the link violates stack overflow rules, feel free to edit it out)
in response to being put on hold:
This question appears to have been put on hold as "off topic", I don't belive it should be, it does involve tools used directly and exclusively for programming (iTunes connect, which is only used by programmers) It would not be seen by the people who actually use it if it was on superuser, and I think the number of other people who have experienced the same problem and replied in a short time shows that it is on topic and helpful to a large portion of the programming community.
There is a thread on Apple forums about the issue https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/84146
I reported this to Apple yesterday through iTunesConnect and received a call back today (my spike started 8/16 and is just starting to trail off now). They are investigating this; the call lasted over 10 minutes. They promised to keep me in the loop so I will report back when I hear something.
same here too. a game I released a year ago had very few downloads. Over the last two months I have seen a slight increase in downloads, 1 or 2, maybe up to 5 per day, all from China. All of a sudden in the last week I have seen 50, 80, and yesterday it peaked at 123 downloads.
I should also mention, this is a free game, with AdMob adverts.
Either the people who download the game aren't actually playing it at all (not one single ad show in China) or AdMob just doesn't work in China ???
either way - I've had about 500 downloads in the last week compared to ~300 in the entire previous year.
there is an IAP to upgrade the game and remove ads, needless to say, not one single user has paid.
a very strange situation. I wish I knew what was driving the Chinese downloads but I can't find anything pointing to my game ?! Also iTunes Connect seems to say they are coming from store browsing ?!
curiouser and curiouser ...
Similar story here:
I have 2 apps, that I made about 2 years ago basically for fun. They get about 20-35 downloads per day. Since 17 Aug, they receive about 120-150 per day, all the extra downloads from China. These numbers don't have any effect on my admob performance, and no significant changes on firebase. I call them ghost-downloads.
I switched one of the apps from free to paid. The downloads for that app went down to zero (as I expected)
If you want to have an accurate real user traffic stats, check the "Daily Active Users" & "Daily Active Devices" from itunes connect as reference.
From my own stats, I can see there are extra ~100 download spike daily from Chinese market, but the DAU stays the same, which means these downloads were not initiated by users, might be a 3rd party app crawler automated the crawling for apps using simulators or automation iOS devices. So don't worry about it, the trend should go away in a while.
If you are curious which 3rd party app crawlers are downloading your apps, google "[your app name] + 应用", you should find tons of them. Websites like these crawl lots of app data and run SEO to attract traffic, and benefits from online advertisements (adsense, etc.)
I have the same phenomenon across free apps in the App store. It results in approximately 1000 downloads from China per day, spread pretty evenly across about 15 apps. Each app download is around 100-200MB so that implies a reasonable burden on the App store servers if it is happening with other apps also. I contacted Apple and they did not seem to ask anything but questions that clearly indicated a complete lack of interest in understanding the issue. They suggested that the problem was not a problem but a volume download program. They then asked to see screenshots from affected users.
The exact same thing happened to me (hundreds of extra downloads per day from China only) within the past week. It's not just one app but every one I have created so far. At first I thought it was an iTunes Connect bug but maybe my apps were just featured somewhere public? There are over a Billion people there after all. ;)
I would like to confirm this, and share some data as well. Take a look. The deviation in traffic started around mid of July, and all of my apps have been downloaded roughly in the same amount. Few days ago I noticed that downloads returned to their normal level. All of abnormal purchases took place from China. Maybe this will shed some light on the source, but I doubt that this traffic generated by real people.
At first I thought this was great news, a lot of downloads, but then my cynical side popped in. Perhaps they are downloading the IPAs unzipping them and looking at the source code. They would only have the front end, but that's half the solution. Here is an article about pirated apps
https://www.cultofmac.com/224075/china-has-its-own-app-store-that-lets-users-install-pirated-ios-apps-without-jailbreaking/
You want to look for ways to obfuscate your code.
Updates:
By the end of September my abnormal Chinese ghost-downloads have disappeared. Everything is back to normal.
On the 8th of September I experienced something much more extreme an unexpected: Approximately 6000 "downloads" from Sweden. It happened only once.
I am building an app for a client that will have 30 days of content for free, thereafter you are required to buy a subscription via in app store purchases.
However, I have read that you will get rejected if you have trials.
Don’t set time limits on any of the functionality of your app, either
for run times or life times. Applications that only run for a set
number of minutes per session, or that expire altogether after some
period of time, don’t recruit customers so much as leave a bad taste
in their mouths.
Finally, they also say "your app will be returned to you by the App Review Team for modification if it is found to have time limits".
This seems odd because I know the Guardian and all major newspaper apps have limited functionality.
The Guardian app is free but you get limited functionality?
The Daily app is free, but you have to pay for daily subscriptions
and has limited functionality for the period of your subscription.
The Times app is free, but is a free trial (of sorts) (plenty of
complaints about it)
There are other examples which seem to differ from Apple's policies.
Lets say you have an app that is free, but then you have to pay for subscriptions to gain access; however according to the rules this is considered limited functionality -- yet there are lots of newspaper apps that do exactly that.
I'm confused.
Can someone clarify the situation? Can apps have trials?
Thanks
It is difficult to clarify the situation because unfortunately the guidelines are not necessarily set in stone. They can and do vary on an app and publisher basis.
In the case of The Times and The Daily, both apps are produced by News Corp. It is perhaps safe to say that News Corp has a good deal more influence with Apple than a one-man development shop producing an iPhone game. Apple would be loath to admit it, but there are clear cases of popular apps on the store that don't conform to the guidelines, where they have tacitly made an exception.
So what I would say to you is this: be sensible. Don't have an app that quits automatically when your trial runs out. Think about what would be acceptable to users. It's very much a case of nothing ventured, nothing gained. Take a risk, submit your app with your limited trial, and see what happens.
With the Guardian app, we had to deliver an app where you always got at least some fresh content if you were using the free version. Subscribing opens up more content to the user.
I think, you are mixing up "content" and "functionality".
You can deliver content items (i.e. an magazine issue) for free or user has to pay for it — so the first n issues, or all issues in a certain timeframe, can be free, while the others need to be paid. But if an user purchased an content item before, you have to re-deliver it for free.
You can sell functionalities (i.e a search in the magazine's archive) as-well. But you cannot give it to the user for free for a certain time and them make him pay.
So the general rule is: What ever the user got from you — you cannot take it back from them and make them purchase it again.
There are plenty of free apps which provide limited functionality. They don't provide time limits though (or at least they shouldn't). I'm guessing it won't be as clear cut as accept or reject for Apple, because I did encounter an app which closes itself after 10 minutes, opening a web page to purchase it (closing an app is also against the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, as an app should never terminate itself).
The guidelines mention this is only allowed for specific types of content:
11.9 Apps containing content or services that expire after a limited time will be rejected, except for specific approved content (e.g. films, television programs, music, books)
11.15 Apps may only use auto-renewing subscriptions for periodicals (newspapers, magazines), business Apps (enterprise, productivity, professional creative, cloud storage), and media Apps (video, audio, voice), or the App will be rejected
I am a member of a gliding club with 150 members, and we want to have our own iPhone app. Requiring a member login, the app would be usable only by members of the club, and it would be used by an estimated 20-30 people.
Is it even possible to disribute such an app to non-jailbroken iPhones? According to my research:
It wouldn't be accepted on the App Store due to "limited audience".
Even if we were able and willing to pay $300 for the enterprise distribution model, Apple would likely not accept us as a company.
Ad hoc distribution would be fine for us except for the expiration time associated with apps distributed in the manner.
Are we at a dead end?
Thanks.
Edit: In case anyone is wondering why I didn't just ask Apple directly: I did, and their answer was, "We are unable to advise you with respect to the Apple Developer Program that best fits your needs."
I'm not 100% on your question.
But depending on your requirement, pretty much everything you need can be achieved as a web app, with the correct coding behind it i.e. CACHE MANIFEST you could make the app function similar to the a native app, available offline and can be saved to any iOS device through the browser.
Give me a shout if you need more information.
Hope it helps
Gary
You could always try to make the app a little more "global"? Perhaps offer some free stuff for Joe Bloggs to use, but tucked away you have your real motive... that way you can get it released legitimately.
I've seen some real disasters in the app store that shouldn't have made it, and I'm sure Apples screening isn't as intense as we might think. (example: that flash light application, when pressing a sequence of buttons it would enable free tethering).
Best of luck!
Yup. You seem to have all the options laid out pretty clearly, and there's no other way to do it. Except developing for android, and just distributing the application freely and without arbitrary restrictions.
Sorry.
Ad-hoc distribution would give you about 90 days expiration time, i think, whereas enterprise would give you a year. Though gaining enterprise status in the eyes of apple is easier said than done.
Even if we were able and willing to pay $300 for the enterprise distribution model, Apple would likely not accept us as a company.
You don't have to be a company to apply for the enterprise account, you just need to be an organisation with a DUNS number.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
Is there a good alternative for Flurry ?
I use it because it is simple to integrate, but i'm not so happy with the webinterface. I miss the google-analitic-ness, but i dont want to use google.
So, what are your experiences with other analytics for iPhone ?
greets Simon
Edit:
http://www.localytics.com/ Nice GUI, good API
Simon, check out Localytics (I work there). Our service is real-time, our SDKs are open source, there are both free and paid service plans, and we just released a huge update to our web interface. You can access the demo (no registration required) here: https://dashboard.localytics.com/demo
--Brian
AskingPoint.com (I work there and am the founder).
Not free, now starts at 49$ (supports iOS and Android APPS)
Has the following capabilities:
Basic Analytics
Unlimited Named Custom Events with or without data.
Unlimited Timed Events with or without data.
In-App Msgs and Push Notifications
Monetization tools (Ads, Cross Promotion)
A Dashboard.
An embedded Ratings widget that is controlled from your account dashboard, uses your analytics and is translated into 30 languages.
Free Data Export (all data).
Fast and easy integration.
We have an App for viewing your data on the go, and our web interface does NOT use flash so you can alternatively view your dashboard on your iPad or iPhone in a browser... but use our app instead.
We don't and won't sell your data. We are free because we plan on eventually making our money from an opt-in service that we will charge third parties for the revenue from which we will share with the Apps that participated and helped generate it.
There is also HockeyApp. I am comparing Flurry and HockeyApp based solely on grokking their website propaganda, and my summary is that HockeyApp is more "fix-centric", whereas Flurry is more "sales-centric:" Dev & QA would benefit more from HockeyApp's great crash reporting features, and Product Management would benefit more from Flurry's crazy slice-and-dice analytics. Hopefully that helps guide you based on what you are trying to accomplish.
Update: I had a quick chat with the Crittercism dudes and wanted to add my findings. Their offering seems to fill the gap between fix-centric HockeyApp, and sales-centric Flurry. It uses the same underlying PLCrashReporter library to produce robust crash reports like HockeyApp does, and it seems to have more Flurry-like analytics than HockeyApp. Also, pricing ... Flurry is free (though they seem to monetize through advertising on their WWW interface). HockeyApp has pricing based on plans, starting with a $10/month plan. Crittercism prices based on # of active users of your app and you have to work with their sales folks to eek out an actual number.
Also update regarding support: HockeyApp's support is excellent; I've never waited more than 10 minutes to get a response back to my questions and the responses are succinct and accurate. Flurry, about 24 hr turnaround and a fairly unpersonalized and lifeless response that was mostly accurate. Crittercism has been quite fast to respond to my inquires; they have a "Chat Now!" button that put me through to the CTO, which was great for the technical questions I had.
Some key specifics and elaborations:
HockeyApp automatically symbolicates users' crashreports on their web
interface, and can group crashes by crashing API. Flurry does not;
it just shows you a bunch of raw crashes and you get to manually
symbolicate them one instruction at a time (using atos -- you can't
use symbolicatecrash because Flurry doesn't give you a proper
.crash report). Be aware that line numbers in HockeyApp can be off
by one or two lines.
The crash reports that Flurry shows you do not include other running
processes, whereas HockeyApp's do. In fact, it appears that Flurry
crash reports are truncated to 255 characters or so. They are anemic compared to HockeyApp.
For crashes you mark as fixed in HockeyApp's web UI, HockeyApp can
inform a user who subsequently experiences such a crash that the
issue has been fixed in a new version.
Flurry has very deep analytics prowess that HockeyApp cannot touch:
tracking usage stats, customer engagement, average session length,
geographic distribution of your app, user retention over time.
Flurry is free; HockeyApp (free up to 10 apps). Both
provide email support, but only HockeyApp provides a discussion
group. Both can record arbitrary messages (like a JSON response from
the server that caused your app to crash) but only HockeyApp
indicates that this message can be any length.
Alas, these are just a few random tidbits that appealed to my developer-nature and cause me to prefer HockeyApp. I wonder what would happen if I used both in my app!
If you have 7 minutes, HockeyApp has a video walkthrough that I found quite useful.
Cobub Razor is an open source free system like Flurry. And it opens both SDK and web side source codes.
Demo: http://demo.cobub.com/razor/en
GitHub: http://www.github.com/cobub/razor
Mixpanel, I have heard a lot of good thing about their product https://mixpanel.com/
I applied a week ago to Apple via internet to join the Iphone Development Program, and sent 'em my $99.00.
I was of the impression that generally, the response was quick. However, other than an email acknowledging my purchase, I have not seen anything at all.
Would some kind soul explain to me what to expect, and when?
Thanks in advance for any information.
John Doner
You'll get a phone call that verifies your credentials in about 2-4 weeks and then you're good, ie. you can get your code provisioning certificates and start submitting apps.
I'd recommend emailing apple (devenroll#apple.com) or use the contact form here: http://developer.apple.com/contact/
I registered a few weeks ago and received my activation within a few hours - no phone call from apple or anything beyond the initial $99.
I initially signed up for the iPhone developer program when registration was opened wider after the initial rush. It took about a week, I never had to talk to anybody on the phone and got the acceptance email. Once you get the email you need to activate it, but that will all be explained in the EMail.
I do most of my non-accelerometer development in the simulator and double check everything on my iPod after things are working in the simulator.
I had the same scenario as you last summer and had to call up Apple Developer Tech Support. They finished setting me up right away.
The phone number to call is found here: http://developer.apple.com/contact/phone.html