C'mon Apple, you can do better than this

Building my first iOS app, I figured the hard part would be the code. Turns out the hard part was Apple's paperwork.

Total time from paying for the dev program to my app actually being live: three weeks. And I actually paied for that → $99/year, plus 30% of every sale.

First hurdle: the tax form. There's a field for your legal name, pulled straight from your Apple account, and you can't edit it.

Problem: my account didn't have my legal name on it. So the form just... wouldn't let me finish.

I go to support chat. They send me to another department. That department tells me, nope, not us either, go file a request on the dev portal.

Cool, love that for me.

I file it, explain exactly what I need. Five days of silence. Then an email: "fixed it!" I go back to the form: they'd spelled my last name wrong.

So now I get to do round two.

Round two actually went fine, a few hours and done. Small win.

Finally submit my app for review. Apple says 24-48 hours. Five days pass. Radio silence.

Turns out there's a secret expedited review form you can fill out if the normal process is taking forever. I fill it out, and got rejected in literally 10 minutes because I hadn't set up my product IDs and policy links right.

Fix it, resubmit, and the next day: approved. But only after going through that expedited form, the "normal" queue just never moved.

So: three weeks, start to finish, just to get an app live. For a service that takes a $99 toll upfront and a 30% cut on every transaction after.

Not the smoothest first impression, Apple!