In case you missed the announcement, StopTheMadness Pro is available now! StopTheMadness Pro is a major update and paid upgrade to my Safari extension StopTheMadness.
Last year I blogged about App Store pricing inflexibility. Nothing much has changed since then. Sadly, those issues persist. I decided to bite the bullet for StopTheMadness Pro, combining the iOS App Store and Mac App Store versions into one Universal Purchase for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Too many consumers are confused when they buy StopTheMadness in one App Store only to discover that they have to buy it again in the other App Store. The price I've set for StopTheMadness Pro is approximately what I would charge for a cross-platform app bundle, which the App Store doesn't support.
Since the App Store doesn't support paid upgrades either, I decided to create app bundles so that previous customers could upgrade for a discount. There's one bundle for the iOS App Store and one bundle for the Mac App Store. Ironically, you can bundle a Universal app with an iOS app in the iOS App Store, and you can bundle a Universal app with a Mac app in the Mac App Store, but you can't bundle an iOS app with a Mac app, which is why I could never offer a bundle for StopTheMadness Mobile and StopTheMadness Mac. Anyway, the price of my app bundles are the same price as StopTheMadness Pro, so previous customers get to discount the price they already paid for StopTheMadness Mac or StopTheMadness Mobile. (The prices have varied over the years.) Unfortunately, the app bundles don't account for the situation where someone has already previously purchased both StopTheMadness in the Mac App Store and StopTheMadness Mobile in the iOS App Store. The best those people can do is choose the cheaper of the two upgrade bundles. There's not much I can do to handle every possible scenario well, given the App Store's pricing inflexibility.
My plan was to release StopTheMadness Pro on Tuesday December 12. The iOS and Mac apps had already been approved by Apple on Friday December 8, less than 24 hours after submission to App Store Connect. I would have preferred to release on Monday December 11, but I wanted my own news cycle, and I had anticipated that iOS 17.2 and macOS 14.2 would be released on Monday. The .N releases are almost always Monday in recent years, and that continued to be true on December 11, proving my guess to be correct!
On the morning of Tuesday December 12 at 5:30am my time, I released StopTheMadness Pro. After checking all of the downloads to ensure that everything was working as expected, I created two app bundles and submitted them for review before 7am. The reason I waited until Tuesday to create the upgrade app bundles is that App Store Connect doesn't allow you to create an app bundle for an app that hasn't yet been published to the App Store, not even if the app is Pending Developer Release (the status of StopTheMadness Pro since Friday).
When I say you can't create an app bundle, I mean that strictly: there's literally nothing you can do. You can't start working on the app bundle, and thus you can't submit the app bundle to Apple for review. In fact, I had forgotten that app bundles need to be reviewed by Apple, because I hadn't created one in years. I don't really understand why Apple needs to review app bundles, because the apps themselves have already been approved by Apple, and the bundle just offers a price discount on the apps. After all, you can change the individual prices on any of your apps at any time without review.
I hadn't requested an expedited review since 2021, so I decided to request one for my app bundles. Unfortunately, it turns out that you can't request an expedited review for an app bundle. The list of app names doesn't include the app bundles, and if you try to manually enter the app bundle name, the form doesn't accept it.
To make a long story short, my app bundles finally went into review at 9am on Thursday December 14 and were approved 8 minutes later. Between Tuesday morning and Thursday morning, I emailed Apple Developer Support once and called them on the phone twice. I emailed Trystan Kosmynka, Apple's senior director of App Review, who had contacted me last year about a different issue and told me at the time, "If there is any hang up in the future do not hesitate to file an expedite request", so I thought it was worth discussing the impossibility of expediting an app bundle review. As a last resort, I also emailed Tim Cook. I don't know whether Kosmynka or Cook (or one of Cook's assistants) ever saw my email, as there was no reply. Incidentally, on Wednesday December 13, while I was still waiting for the app bundles to be reviewed, I submitted updates to the StopTheMadness Pro iOS and Mac apps, both of which were reviewed and approved within 6 hours—ahead of my app bundles, even though Apple Developer Support told me over the phone that they granted my expedited review request for the app bundles.
During those two days when StopTheMadness Pro was live in the App Store but the upgrade bundles were not, customers were already starting to notice StopTheMadness Pro, despite the fact that I hadn't announced it yet. And those customers were very confused, because the approved App Store description of the app mentioned the upgrade bundles, yet the bundles were nowhere to be found in the App Store. People were contacting me via email and other methods to ask about it. The whole situation was a mess. The only thing I'm thankful for is that word about the existence of StopTheMadness Pro didn't spread further and go public before the upgrade bundles were ready, because that would have been a complete disaster.
On Thursday, with the bundles finally approved, I announced StopTheMadness Pro to the public. Announcing earlier wouldn't have made sense, because previous customers wouldn't yet have a path to upgrade from StopTheMadness to StopTheMadness Pro. You have only one chance to make a big splash with your announcement, and announcing without the upgrade bundles would have been a belly flop. Luckily, StopTheMadness Pro did get a few mentions in the media, and sales were good. However, I still really wish I had been able to announce on Tuesday, and I worry that the release lost momentum and publicity when the weekend hit. I didn't receive any more mentions in the media afterward. If I had known the app bundle reviews would take so long, I would have released the apps themselves earlier.
As far as purchases are concerned, the upgrade bundles have not gone as smoothly as I would have liked. My customers generally appreciate the existence of the bundles, but a number of them have contacted me, and continue to contact me, with technical issues regarding the bundle purchases. For example, the full price is shown rather than the upgrade price. The app is not available for download after the bundle is purchased. The App Store gives an error, "This item is temporarily unavailable." One customer's Apple ID was even banned after attempting to purchase the bundle! Fortunately, the customer was able to get their Apple ID un-banned later after talking to Apple, though Apple has refused to say why the account was banned in the first place.
Of course, there's absolutely nothing I can do for any of these customers. App Store developers have no access to or power over App Store purchases or downloads. Apple's monopolistic control over the App Store is supposedly for the "protection" of customers, but the customers are contacting me rather than Apple. They blame me rather than Apple, even though it's entirely Apple's fault. App Store developers have so little control over the App Store that we can't even provide refunds to customers. Everything has to go through Apple. Hence I sigh and send these people to Apple Support, which is all I can do, knowing that Apple Support itself is often clueless and incompetent. More than one customer has related to me what Apple Support told them: the (incorrect) price of the bundle shown in the App Store is the developer's (my) fault. It's painfully obvious that the Apple Support representatives themselves are confused in these cases, but who are customers going to believe, a nobody like me, or an "Apple Senior Advisor"? It's frustrating, because I've been a professional Apple developer for 17 years, so my "seniority" likely exceeds theirs by more than a decade, at least.
For all the money that Apple has made from the App Store over the years, I haven't seen a corresponding investment on either the technical side or on the customer service side. The crApp Store is still crappy for both developers and customers, and this situation serves no one, except perhaps AAPL stockholders looking for the company to minimize costs and maximize profits, reputation and goodwill be damned.