App Management

Creating the app is the real starting point of “releasing”. This chapter covers everything from creating a new App record to version management: Bundle ID selection, metadata and privacy configuration, enabling features such as IAP/events, and version numbering. Every step directly affects whether review goes smoothly, and several of the decisions you make here are effectively permanent, which is why it pays to know which fields you can revise later and which ones you cannot.

The chapter opens with the fields you supply when creating a new App and, more importantly, with the ones Apple locks afterwards — the Bundle ID above all, because choosing it badly means abandoning the record and starting a new app rather than renaming the one you have. From there it covers the metadata that decides how an app is found and how it is judged: the name, subtitle, keyword string, and category have to work as search terms and still satisfy Apple’s naming rules, while the privacy policy URL, the age rating questionnaire, and the App Privacy data labels have to describe what the app actually does rather than what you wish it did. Version and build numbering is the other half of that foundation, because the version number is the customer-facing label and the build number is the internal counter that has to increase on every upload, and conflating the two is a classic source of stuck submissions. The chapter then moves to the feature switches — in-app purchases, in-app events, push notifications, and associated domains — each of which has its own configuration entry point and its own effect on what the review team expects to find in the build.

After the material you should be able to create a new App in App Store Connect and choose the Bundle ID, SKU, and target platforms correctly, fill in complete and compliant metadata covering name, description, keywords, privacy declarations, and contacts, enable app features on demand and know where each of their configuration screens lives, apply version and build numbering correctly and run the pre-submission checklist against a release candidate, and plan how metadata will be localized for multilingual markets. If you are shipping a first release, read in order and follow along while creating the app, since the field-level decisions only make sense against a live record. If you are maintaining an app that is already live, concentrate on version management and app features, because that is where new capabilities and new in-app purchases arrive. If you publish into multilingual markets, give the localization part of app information particular attention, since a partially translated listing reads as a broken product to the users who find it.