Who would have thought that? After months of slogging through the world of app development, d-day is finally in sight. Your idea for an app has finally taken off and you have found a product market fit in the past month or months. The app has been extensively tested and is virtually bug free and all core functionality works as expected. It's almost party time...
Whether your app has been developed by Coffee IT or another party, an app is often only successful if it is available to other people and has therefore been published in the Google Play and Apple App Store.
But how does app publishing work? What should you take into account and what are possible obstacles when publishing an app? And perhaps even more important for some: What are the costs for the publish an app?
What exactly will happen when your app is published?
When the app publishing is complete, it will be available to the users of the Google Play and/or Apple Store. To achieve this, the app developer will publish the app on his own account or on your own account. Creating a Google Play and Apple Developer account costs a total of about 150 to 200 euros. We always advise our customers to create their own account(s) on which we publish the app(s). This ensures that your own company name is listed with the app. We also believe that the customer should continue to have the free choice of app developer and that the customer chooses us for the right reasons and not because we own the intellectual property of his app.
Obviously, but what else does the app developer do?
The app developer first ensures that the store listing is in order. The Store Listing is how your app is displayed to visitors to the store (in this case, the Google Play and Apple App Store). The store listing contains a number of images and texts, the quality of these images and texts is important for the findability and retention of your app. Improving the quality of the store listing is called App Store Optimization (ASO). To complete the store listing, a compressed version is provided by the app developer. After that, the app gets the status 'pending publication' which is actually a bad translation of the English status 'in review'.
Is the app not live yet?
Unfortunately, you'll have to wait for approval from Apple and Google before your app is visible to others. In this test phase, Apple and Google check that your app does not contain any software that is harmful to users. They also check whether your app violates the guidelines set by them. If they suspect that this is the case, they will contact the app developer. If these are gross violations and if this happens more often, your app may no longer be published. However, it often remains with a number of questions about how the app works and what you do with the rights of the user. For app developers who have already published several apps, this process is generally a bit faster. We, Coffee IT, often receive questions about why the publication of an app failed or why the app developer charges high fees for it. Publishing an app shouldn't cost much and updating an app shouldn't take much time at all. Do you run into complex questions from Apple or Google? Please feel free to contact us and we will see what we can do for you.
Lift off!
After this phase, your app is available to the end user. The app publishing is complete! Please note that the app must contain software to detect errors and measure retention, so that you can improve your app with a continuous process. Will there be an update for your app afterwards? Then the above process will be repeated in part.
Conclusion
The turnaround time for publishing an app is variable and questions can always come from Google or Apple. When the accounts, images and texts are provided, publishing an app should not cost much. Are the accounts, images and texts not delivered? Then count on one-off start-up costs. Updating an app (without a change to the store listing) never takes more than half an hour of work. Make sure you have your own Google Play Developer account and Apple Developer account, so you retain ownership of your app.
Do you have questions about the costs of publishing an app or have you received questions from Apple or Google that you cannot answer with certainty? Please feel free to contact us, we will be happy to help you.
