AppStore update review frustrations [relieved!]

I know I shouldn’t be complaining – WiFinder has already made me a lot of money. Or, it will have, once we get paid for August!

But I submitted a major update on August 25th, and it’s now been quite a while. Same bug reports from users; same requests for features over and over and over. During that time, I’ve seen a competitor come up and recently announce they’re going to be adding a subset of the features that I finished and submitted long before they even got into the AppStore! Will they get in first? Who knows! There’s no transparency at all in the review process.

To boot, I have a slew of further updates – authentication storage for password-protected access points, auto-handling of web-page style logins on Open networks that redirect, etc. – that I also wrote pre-September. But at this point it feels like it’s really not worth working on anything else. My users have asked for more NetStumbler-esque features, like exporting found networks along with locations to some standard formats. I’ve already got the infrastructure there, but with the prospect of it possibly not going live for Steve-knows-how-long, why bother?

Urgh! The AppStore – I love it, and I hate it. I’m seriously debating just making the app free and removing all the worry about what were my sales yesterday / what’s my UK rank today / how many German users are having problems / what new reviews finally went up…

EDIT: Okay, Ms. Louv rocks! I sent an additional whiny-mail along the lines of this blog post to the dev support alias, and she got back to me and personally did the review. It should be up and ready for everybody in just a few hours. Thanks, Ms. Louv – you’re a total rockstar