Comment by andrekandre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrekandre | Hacker News Reader

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apple never gives us the release day, so we are always biting nails

when fatal bugs, or issues are reported, there is little communication from apple... alot people/companies depend on what apple is doing here

hisotrically, they announce new stuff, then ios is released about 1 week later (conveyed at the annnouncement)

this time, it was one day.

alot of us had apps already in testing and preparation, but depending on what features you might have used, some bugs occur that have either no workaround of nasty workarounds, and we need the GM release to confirm certain things and how to proceed

i cant talk about the issues i have faced in my job, but this 1 day notice has not gone off well

-- as an aside --

personally, my feelings towards apple has soured very much, and anecdotally, many friends who work in industry who have to deal with apple (apps, app store, safari etc) have soured on them too

when people say "apple doesnt care about developers" i can understand thier feelings somewhat...

I guess my response would be should Apple hold off releasing a major OS update until it has received thumbs up from every single developer? Of course not. The betas for iOS 14 have been out for a long time now (not sure of specific dates). If your app wasn't ready for GM today, then was it really ever going to be? I would assume Apple expects that after each beta version is released, developers update their code for that version with the hope that it is promoted to GM.

Even if zero app changes are required, you must still:

1. Download, extract, and run the new version of Xcode.

Note: you cannot upload builds for production App Store with pre-GM builds. You _must_ use the GM or production Xcode.

It's a 12 GB download, and extracting takes 20 minutes. Factor in about an hour here. Especially around when it's posted you can expect a very slow download.

2. Build, execute and validate the app at least _launches_.

Maybe another 30 minutes.

3. Create and upload an archived build to Apple.

Maybe another 30 minutes.

4. Wait for the uploaded build to finish processing.

This takes somewhere between 1-3 hours.

5. Submit the finished-processing build.

Manual inspection of metadata, screenshot uploading, etc. Let's call it 20 minutes.

6. Wait for approval from Apple.

Who knows how long.

7. Release.

So this is somewhere around 4-5 hours at _minimum_ of work to get the build uploaded.

When you're told at 11am that users will have it in their hands the next day, even if you are incredibly prepared, there's simply very little time to actually do the above in a safe way. And if you're not on Pacific Time, you're going to miss this window entirely.

Not to mention Apple uploaded a GM build of Xcode around noon, and then silently replaced it with an updated version sometime later without explaining what the difference was. Fun stuff.

Also: the GM build has regressions.

Thanks for that walk through. Again since I'm not an app dev, I have no insight into this process.

Do certain vendors get pre-release access that smaller vendors do not? Does Twitter/Facebook/etc have to do the same thing you just described? If it was truly as bad as you are making it out to be, how in the world does the eco-system survive? There's no way Apple could expect to be able to handle reviewing every single app in this manner. Surely something is missing?

I do not believe they distributed the GM build of Xcode to anybody early. This is the first time they've ever pulled "also tomorrow it's out" -- they usually give 1 week to get app submissions in.

I also believe that, right now, they're just rubber stamping all app reviews. They cannot handle this volume.

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