What to ask your agency about app store review

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on app store review, these questions are worth asking early.

You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Build review time into the release plan, not around it. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Keep a build ready in case a hotfix is needed. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

In practice

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. Three things worth confirming about app store review before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Keep a build ready in case a hotfix is needed — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.