BarNiteBingo approved!

BNB got approved by Apple tonight, so it should release in the App Store this Friday, Nov 20th. We also submitted ShotTacToe for approval last night, with a hopeful release date of Dec 3rd.

We're excited to get BNB out on the App Store and see how well it does. We've had about 90 sales on Android in about a month, with 60 cancels. Not numbers we're really excited about, but at least there's been some interest. We're hopeful that the numbers we've read between the two (Android vs App Store) hold true for our app, and we can get a much larger amount of traffic on the App Store.

Of course there is always the possibility of falling into obscurity in the App Store since there are SO MANY APPS, so we've got to get the marketing machine up and rolling to generate some buzz about BarNiteBingo!

BNB rejected

BarNiteBingo was rejected from the App Store tonight, based on usage of a private API. On the settings screen for BNB we have a switch that turns game sounds on and off, as well a slider that hooks up to the MPVolumeView to adjust the device volume. We were responding to the AVSystemController_SystemVolumeDidChangeNotification, and in the resulting method, calling the following private method:

[volumeViewSlider _updateVolumeFromAVSystemController];

This caused the app to get rejected. I wanted to blog this, because I've read in several places on the internet that this method is NOT a private API and wouldn't get your app rejected. I've also heard rumblings that Apple is now using a static analysis tool to detect private API usage, so maybe that is why it was rejected.

Anyway, I'd stay away from this API if you want your app approved, and if you've already got an app on the App Store with this API, you might be careful submitting updates to it. We ended up removing the slider altogether, as it wasn't really needed.