I'm like, yes, tomorrow on my birthday it's going to get approved into the app store because now everything else is done. But then we come to 18th of September, I wake up, I look at my phone and hello there's a rejection again. Hello and welcome to episode 62 of the Metacast Behind the scenes by podcast. I'm your host, Yulee Bezlif. And I'm Arnapp Deca.
We are co-founders of Metacast, a podcast app that has transcripts that helps you learn from podcasts. So with Metacast you can read your podcast if you want to, you can search podcasts, you can make bookmarks of the things that were said and you can share in such moments with those who you care about. And in this podcast we talk about our behind the scenes of building the app and today is a very big milestone for us. What is it Arnapp?
We did a big, very soft launch onto the Apple iOS app store. So we're going to talk about that today. We're going to talk about what are the next steps and give you a little bit behind the scenes of the things that we should have done earlier that would have made this launch easier.
And I think Ilya will eventually write this up in a nice blog post so that people who want just the summary of those they can go read it. But I think if I were to build an app and launch it again there are some things that we would have done differently. So we'll talk about some of those today. And we try to keep every episode to about 30-ish minutes. We don't always succeed but we're getting closer and closer to that aim. So that's what you should expect today too.
Cool. Today is September 25th is when we're recording this and we pushed our app to the app store on Friday which was September 19th I believe it was. I mean we have been attempting since like September 14th or so. I mean the actual launch actual soft launch happened on Friday. Maybe let's talk a little bit about the whole thing right. We were ready to submit the app to the app store at some point. Just about a week and a half to weeks ago.
Yeah I think it was 14th or 15th we submitted the first time. I thought it took longer. I thought it took over a week to get approval from Apple. You may be right. You may be right. Because we did have quite a few rejections that we'll talk about. Yeah I think rejected by Apple should be the title of this episode. Oh yeah. Well soft rejected by Apple should be that title because it wasn't outright rejected.
Right it was pretty soft. Anyway so we were ready to launch as in we had all the code complete. We put together nice pictures and we started to fill in the form for the app submission. Actually one thing that I wanted to call out right away is the very first issue we faced when we were submitting to Apple. Yeah and you are going to be talking about the problems today because who wants to hear about success stories right. It's not one of those success stories. It was not as simple as I expected.
So I created all of those nice pictures. I uploaded them to the form. I hit submit and it tells me well you know what you also need pictures for the iPhone in the 5.5 inch screen size. Which is the iPhone 8 and below. Those are the phones that still had the button. The big button at the bottom touch ID. Yeah. Yes. So they have a different aspect ratio from the newer phones. Well newer. iPhone X came out I think in 2019 or 2018. Maybe 2016ish or so.
Yeah like seven eight years ago. And guess what? For those phones. For those pictures you have to have the screenshots from the app in the same aspect ratio as the phone. So you can't just put pictures from like iPhone X put them into the older phone. Well the reason why I didn't need these pictures is because if you're using the app store from one of those older phones they will show you different pictures. So ideally you want to have pictures in the right aspect ratio.
And also if you use the phone chrome you want to have the chrome with the button on it. So that really resonates with the person who looks at the picture. And turned out that taking screenshots from the app in the right aspect ratio was a challenge because we don't have a physical device that meets those standards. I use the simulator on the Mac to take the screenshots. I had to install the simulator for the older phone the iPhone 8. But you know what? It doesn't support the latest iOS version.
So I had to download and install the older iOS version. I think it was 16.4. So it took probably like extra 8 gigabytes of space on my hard disk. Piling on Xcode from last episode. It is pretty notorious if you want to install more versions. How much space it takes and... Yeah I remember the command line toolstake like 3 gigabytes or something. It's just crazy. There are websites and like SaaS tools available by the way.
If you want to take screenshots of your app in different aspect ratios and devices. But they also require a lot more that we were not willing to do at that point. So we were like okay we'll just do this on the simulator is what you decided. Right but also some of the screenshots you want to take maybe like mid-action. So you actually want to have control or what you're doing. Also I'm logged in with my account. So it's easiest to do it on the actual phone.
If you don't have the phone the second easiest is the simulator. Just preparation for that took a bit of effort. Okay that was done. The other challenge that I had they also asked for iPads screenshots. Which because we built in Flutter and it automatically builds an iPad app for you as well. And we did not specify iPhone as the only target in Xcode. So we had to spend a bit of time figuring out how to disable iPad. Because our app runs an iPad and it looks generally okay.
But there are a couple of rough edges where it looks kind of broken. So like if you submit those screenshots it's not going to be looking nice right. So I actually have been using our app on my iPad. I don't use the iPad that much but when I do I've been using it on the side. And the player screen is actually way better to interact with compared to the iPhone. Because there's so much more space for the transcript. But we looked at it and we're like okay some of the other screens.
Especially when you see grid of like podcasts. And those grid we have like coded it up for the phone resolution. So it will show like three things. Then on the iPad it looks humongous. So we're like okay let's not fiddle with all this right now. It'll require some work but not too much work. But we'll do this later for iPad and tablets and just disable it for now. So yeah.
Yeah what I learned from Stack Overflow is that if you submit iPads screenshots I don't think you can take them back after that. It was an important decision that we decided not to fix the app for the iPad right now and just go with the iPhone app. So we basically disabled the iPad as a target. And now if you launch our app on iPad it looks like one of those apps that just is the iPhone app that runs in the middle of the screen.
Like Instagram I think Instagram still is like that or at least was like that for many many years. So iPad is disabled but you can still install it on iPad and you can still run it. It just looks like the phone form factor inside the big screen. And then so our success story continues. We disabled iPad we provided all the screenshots. We put in all of the details that they asked for. Bank submit. It's accepted. It moves to the status waiting for review.
And I think within 24 hours we got the response back. Just overall I think we were sending new submissions almost daily. I think we did it four or five times. Every time they responded back to us within 24 hours. It was pretty reasonable. Very good. And the response was very clear. Compared to our Google experience, a few episodes back. We talked about the Google approval process where Google approved it almost immediately.
But then after a few days they sent us these policy violations with air quotes saying that your app will be removed from the app store. You need to fix this within like seven days and we scrambled and fixed those things. But those things the policy violations itself the language used and the communication was very unclear about like what are they actually talking about. Whereas this for the Apple one.
Yeah, there were like seven rejections and every day we would do this and submit again and something new would come up. But the communication process was super quick like within a day they would get back. And it was very clear like a human being was writing to us about like you need to fix this or add this or remove that. Yeah. And the January 4th the same structure. It was your app doesn't meet the requirement whatever 1.7 make it up the number.
And then there is a copy paste that part of that requirement and then something like in particular. And then they say like you have to have a working terms of service link in the metadata. So it was very straightforward as in we didn't have to parse the whole guideline to understand what's wrong. They gave us this specific part of the guideline. But then it took some stack overflowing to actually figure out what they mean by metadata.
And where to put the terms of service link turns out you put the link in the description of the app. And when you look at the app features to search for meta cast in the app store and you see the privacy policy in terms of service link at the bottom those links are not clickable. Actually, I don't do you know if you can copy paste them I haven't checked. But the point is it's just so weird that they require to do it this way.
Instead of just having like a terms of service field that they would convert into a link on the app store it just feels weird that they do it this way. And I think it took us a couple of submissions to actually figure out what exactly they wanted there because I think first time you understood that they wanted terms of service copy-pasted into the custom terms of service field that they have because apparently you can use Apple's standard terms of service EULA and user license agreement.
But if you have your own then you need to copy paste plain text in there which I believe they used to run some analysis of it to make sure it covers certain things. And I think the primary thing there is that they don't want Apple to be exposed by any of our terms. They actually have a checklist I think of about eight items that tells you what your terms of service must contain and all of that is about how it's all between you and the user and Apple is just a provider of the platform.
After this one is the rejection where if you try Metacast and you're trying to like purchase the subscription then the subscription screen has a couple of options right the monthly end up and well and then there are some terms of agreements and fine print at the bottom and that screen is scrollable. But I think the review reader did not realize that it's scrollable or they were not
happy that that fine print was below the fold. So they rejected that and said like okay you need to add fine print and all these cancellation terms and all that into this screen right and we were like wait it is in that screen just have to scroll a little bit more. But I think you did some work to change the layout of that screen so that it now shows above the fold on most farm factors. Yeah to be fair to us they were testing it. This is a screenshot which looked like an iPad screen
with an iPhone app running inside it. It was running on a smaller screen device. If you look at our app on the bigger screen like this screen is standard right now like iPhone X and older. Like 6.5 inch or I think 6.5 or 6.7 yeah one of those. So then you actually see some text at the bottom it's cut off so it makes you realize that actually you can scroll it. So there's more there to be fair to Apple when you look at it on a smaller device it just cuts right above the text
and actually all you need is on that screen. So unless you're looking for something else it doesn't occur to you to scroll. So even if it's scrolled I think it's a good sort of pro user requirement to have some indication that it's scrollable and all of the terms and other other stuff is in there. So yeah we just made a couple of minor changes to the layout to make sure that the half of the line sort of sticks out so the user can see that they can scroll and see more.
And that was not all. Now it's about 17th of September okay and for a bit of personal anecdote 18th of September is my birthday and I was hoping that this is it right we'll submit this one more time and we're done. But then Ilya. I think we were getting that text in every single rejection notice that we did not submit one of the in-app subscriptions in-app purchases because we have
subscriptions and we couldn't figure it out because we thought you submit this with the app. So I think up until the point where it was the last thing remaining on the list we were like okay so there
is something going on there. I remember spending some time in Google and then I went to the subscriptions page and App Store Connect and I found that there is like a ready for review button or something for the subscription and I did like submit the review or whatever that button was right and then we submit
the app for review again and it gets rejected again and that was really frustrating. It was the point where I just wanted to write back to them and like it's all in there what I'm talking about right it's not like we are trying to violate something we just can't figure out the UI right and then I
think I asked you to submit because of a video something. Yeah so the subscription the UI is kind of weird right like you're preparing your whole app for subscription but then you add a specific build version of your app into it and in that screen when you add a new version that has never been
added before that's when there is a place to also add your subscription products for the review so I figured okay that's where it is I added it submitted this is 17th of September evening and I'm like yes tomorrow on my birthday it's going to get approved into the App Store because now
everything else is done but then we come to 18th of September I wake up I look at my phone and hello there's a rejection again yes and the reason is again we do not submit something for review and again I'm going through the UI and I just can't figure out what's going on so I think this one
we have two subscription options a monthly and an annual one and the annual one is priced at $49 in the US and there is a 50% off intro offer for the first month until October 31st or something basically if you buy the annual thing then automatically you get a 50% discount for the
first year so it's $25 so what Apple rejected with is this $25 offer which they see manually when they're reviewing the screen they're not seeing that in the metadata is what they said because the metadata has 49 instead of 2499 it says 4999 right to be fair to Apple they wrote like specifically
the 2499 offer right which is good otherwise we would have never figured out what the heck are they talking about exactly and then we go through our whole thing we actually don't see any option to submit that specific introductory offer because it's part of the bigger price bundle whatever it's called in Apple so I write back to them saying that it is an introductory offer it is part of the 4999 it's just like 50% off it's a temporary offer here are the screenshots from App Store Connect which
you have to be really motivated to find where these things are I don't know the interface that they are seeing but for some reason they did not see this right then I think the next message we get from them is approval 19th of September one day late yeah yeah so overall I would say I'm really
pleased with the timelines and the thorness of the Apple review process and also I really appreciate the way they write the feedback and that they responded pretty quickly it felt like a collaboration it didn't feel like fighting a giant right we know we were just trying to meet the requirements and we were collaborating it was all good their UI is horrendous though yeah it felt like the people who were writing back to us could empathize with the fact that it's a lot of work to understand all
this and so they were being as helpful as possible and I think this goes back to one of the recurring themes we have on this podcast which is one of the big cultural difference between Apple and Google is Apple has a lot of manual processes and people replying to you in places and Google has automated a lot of that but that results in experiences like what we had with Google which is they approved it the first time we submitted to production they were like great go ahead all done it's on the
Play Store and then two days later three policy violations I'm like you have to fix this or we'll take down your app within three days so the review process seemed broken right and also you know it feels like season deceased from Google right because they already took it in and then like we
will kick you out if you don't do this and those were simpler violations right imagine if it was something that we really had to like rearchitect something so we would be kicked out from the Google Play Store if we didn't meet it within seven days it would have been a really bad experience I would prefer this stuff to be front-loaded like it is with Apple yeah like this took us a week yeah but at least now I guess I feel pretty comfortable that they are not going to be sending us a random
email the demand to something or else and then once it was approved there is also a bit of confusion in their UI it says app is ready for distribution or available for distribution or something like that and we were wondering like okay does that mean we have to do something or not because we also could not see any obvious button to like distribute it I think at the bottom of the screen there was an option how do you want to distribute the app I think we chose manual which means that once
it's approved doesn't get automatically pushed to the app store we control when we push the button no no I'm saying after that so on 19th of September we receive saying you're approved great then we decided okay why don't we just do it today itself I think it was a Friday or maybe
a Thursday or something right and we decided we'll just do a soft launch and then we'll do all the other things later which is the next part of this podcast we'll talk about but then after we said okay launch it or whatever that button was then the status changes to like ready for
distribution or available for distribution or something like that so it shows you some kind of Apple's internal status that it's like waiting in queue to be distributed or something yeah and now we know it's been like four days the app is available the status is still the same it's like ready
for distribution I remember you and I talking about wait is there one more step like what do we do now but anyway after a while I think the app started appearing in app stores in different regions and all that yeah I think it took a couple of days for it to be fully available everywhere
wait at least everywhere we were we checked yeah and in the beginning when you typed Metacast the exact word and there are no other apps like that at least in the US and Canada stores that we found called Metacast exactly it was appearing in like ETH or NINE place now I think it's starting
to appear in the second or something like that second place or so yeah I think if you search for Metacast enough notes just Metacast the first position for me in the US app store is the ad the second one is something from Meta Meta Oculus Meta Rift or something so it's there
app for the VR and then we are in the second position of the organic search results and there is nothing else just these two apps so I don't know why they show the Meta I don't get an ad for that search but I do get MiraCast the screen mirroring app as the first result and then Metacast and I
think this will probably improve over time as we get more ratings and hopefully reviews and all that hint hint listener yeah so in the interest of time we want to talk about the next steps because we have a very sophisticated process we want to run to offboard our beta users in the prod
so I suggest are not that we actually talk about this in the next episode after we have done it so that we can actually talk about the specifics because it will take probably 15 to 20 minutes and it will be hypothetical whereas we can actually talk about the actual how it went
after we've done it and I think it will be done by the time we record the next episode so that's going to be interesting yeah so I think next up why we're calling it a soft launch is we haven't talked about it anywhere we're still doing some changes in the app to make it even better
and then we're going to start talking about it openly but I think one thing where I am starting to feel and realize is the marketing right I mean we always knew that building the app is only the very first initial step now the actual game of getting people to discover the app is a way bigger
challenge if you are a indie developer or a like a small company like a bootstrap we don't have millions of dollars to like go market this everywhere so that's going to be the big struggle for us I think over the next I'm gonna say a few years while we also improve the app more and more and more
so yeah I agree with you I think up until now we were hesitant to go on other people's podcasts and doing kind of blog posts on hacker news or Reddit we actually we have a really cool blog post that I'm going to be finalizing now about the whole launch process to the Android Google Play Store
and Apple App Store which will update with the latest Apple things that we learned maybe we'll also put that offboarding from beta to the same post to be a very large almost like a guide for people who are one step behind us we want to post this to read it for into hackers or for
SAS groups you know all the stuff which could bring some extra eyeballs for us but until we had the app in both app stores it all felt pretty mature because if you do something like that or go on the podcast somebody else podcasts and talk about that and then somebody who uses an iPhone they
can't use it or they can use it with the test flight but test flight is a pain ass you have to install the test flight and if you're not used to it it's not worth it for many people but now I feel like our hands are untied one of the biggest challenges that we'll be working through that we'll
be talking about in the next episode is how do you enable the paywall because if you're on test flight you cannot pay for the app but the paywall will be still in your face and if you say pay it actually asks you to enter the iCloud password in the early Apple ID password you can't use
the password manager and then use hit subscribe it tells you that it's not gonna be charging you but 15 minutes later the paywall comes back and it's so annoying anything is we do not have a mechanism to tell our beta users now go download the app from the app store we have emails of the people
who signed up with an email and we sent them an email it was earlier today not it was yesterday I sent the email to those people so of all of our ios users two thirds are anonymous users anonymous users all use Apple's private relay which we haven't done the configuration so we can
send emails to those people so we can consider them anonymous so we can't communicate to them in any way right so the thing that we should have done like a year ago when we started building the app is a mechanism to send some kind of in-app notification to the user not just the os level notification
where you get like ometic us wants to show you something no it should be in the app itself where you if you opened up it shows you some thing that you want to show the user that ship has sailed we will talk in next episode how we are going to work around that but it's a complicated process
so yeah if you're building an app make sure you have the way to communicate the users if you expect some kind of transition and migration of those users in the future right and I think we're going to talk about this a little bit more in the next episode because we did build a mechanism to force
users to upgrade to a version if we had to we don't use it often but if and when we need it we do but I think another mechanism to tell users to move from the app altogether into the production app basically a communication mechanism because if you support anonymous users then that becomes
such a challenge to communicate with them yeah I think with the forced upgrade screen we made a mistake what encode mistake it's an oversight right now in hindsight we hard-coded the link to the test flight app so if we had this in remote config and we could change the link then it
would have been not a problem at all we would just force them to upgrade and then it will be linked to the app store and they would go there upgrade yeah but that ship has sailed we'll talk about this more in the next episode I think the force upgrade mechanism the communication as well as the beta
itself presents a lot of challenges to move people off from the beta because we have like I don't know the exact number but like there were hundreds of people on both platforms using like a open beta version of the app that we have to have some way of telling them to move off the beta to use the
production app so we'll talk about this in the next episode so let's close today with our what we've been listening to and reading and all that right so I can start and I hope I don't get cancelled for venturing the content that I could see but I don't care anymore so I've listened to only a couple
of podcasts in the last couple of weeks one of them was a Peter Thiel interview on Joe Rogan podcast it is a three and a half hours interview I love hearing Peter Thiel talk I love his book zero to one I read it twice actually saw him live at Wharton 10 years ago he just wrote his book and
he was promoting it and Adam Grant was the interviewer of Peter Thiel and he was on stage for the students it was really cool yeah he had some really interesting ideas and it's kind of funny that he wants to be a contrarian on every single topic so you do get to hear a lot of alternative ideas some of which I interesting some of them I agree with some of them I don't agree with but yeah it's just an interesting episode overall but if you are not in the conspiracy theories then it may not be
the best use of your time I think both Peter Thiel and Joe Rogan has intentionally I think developed that sort of a public persona being like conspiracy theorists yeah it was fun I remember I was not feeling well actually I was sick but I didn't want to sleep but I couldn't read because my eyes were
hurting so I just listened to the whole thing in one day which is unusual for me I would never listen to like four hours episode on one day the other one was the Donald Trump interview on the Lexington podcast personally I was so happy for Lex kind of following him how he sort of upscaled
his persona and now he gets a former US president on his show it to be fair if he had come out like Harry's on his podcast I would listen to it as well for me it was interesting in a way that it's not some kind of like CNN or whatever Fox News or something talking to a president like a
professional journalist with an agenda so Lex is a podcast bro right like a tech bro and then he talks to former US president so it was just a different kind of discussion than you would hear on mainstream channels professional channels and the funny part about that thing was I start listening
to it and I go to the transcript and there is no transcript it says oh oh I couldn't love the transcript I'm not sending this to Slack I'm like of all episodes the one where we failed the generated transcript is this podcast it's some kind of like left-wing conspiracy against Trump right
the liberal left cTO of meta cast has put enough lag specifically saying any episodes where Donald Trump is mentioned is not going to be transcribed right yeah and then I had to go to the back hand to sort of overwrite that so that the the right-wing fanatics could get the transcript and I'm
I'm just kidding I wouldn't say I learned anything from there but it was interesting because Trump behaved differently there he was less away sort of bombastic working for the audience it was an interesting interview but like generally I didn't or you're not using it but listening to it I also listened to that episode actually because Trump the way he talks in like rallies and debates and all that is pretty bizarre that's my perspective on it but on this one I thought he seemed more like a
normal person how you would have a conversation with so I wanted to listen to that I listened to maybe about a R or so I thought the typical like rambling behavior was there from Trump like you ask him anything and then he's going to like talk about something else and rambulant about everything else
that trend was there I think Lex did a pretty good job bringing him back onto topics in that one hour that I heard but I got the feeling that he wanted to ask a lot more follow-up questions but decided not to ask and I thought he had some great opportunities of like I was wondering okay he
just said that the thing that he said five minutes ago and this our contradictory and I thought like Lex would ask about that but he didn't so it was a bit of a disappointing but overall I feel like this is the most normal side of Trump having a conversation that I've heard in a long time
yeah I think he was probably just working for the different kind of audience in this interview because who listens to Lex are probably mostly intellectuals and you will turn them right away if you yell yes things that he usually does it rallies right so actually that many remember a few years ago
I listened to an episode the podcast called WTF with Mark Marren it's a very famous podcast he's a famous comedian he had a rack abama on his show when abama was still president I believe so I must be listening to like a very old episode before the actual interview he was rambling for about
15 minutes about how the whole thing went because he gave this interview in his own studio and how the whole street was blocked by secret service and all that stuff and how he was just like so anxious about call affair I don't remember much of the interview but I remember that part where he was just
like so freaking out of it reading the US president because it was like highest ranking guest ever on his show actually it was also he good but to listen to him maybe he should reason to that so what about you
so do you remember Dennis Taylor of the Bobbyverse universe of course I do just recently we got a comment so we recorded a podcast interview with him on the builders gonna build podcast which we actually need to resurrect at some point yeah episode three released in February this year yeah and
somebody commented on youtube saying that it was one of the best interviews with Dennis Taylor that this person has ever listened to so kudos to us thank you thank you so the Bobbyverse series I won't give you like the whole thing again but it's one of the best fun sci-fi series that I've read
so book four came out like a couple of years ago and so I was on a road trip for most of early September September six that book dropped so I immediately got it book five and I'm about halfway through it now it's so much fun basically the things are getting grander and grander every book but the style of the book writing with there's a lot of funny like personality kind of things that come across in these AI agents the story writing where the plot gets more and more interesting but it's
never boring where you feel like you want to give up at some point and there are like four or five different plots going on so loving the book so that's what I'm mostly listening to and there's the occasional like the daily podcast and all that that I always listen to that's going on on the
side do you feel like Dennis has grown in his writing as you're consuming his books one after another I think he has a really great balance in knowing when to taper off so my other favorite in this genre there is another really good series called the x-force expeditionary force and Skippy is like the main character in there that series has like 10 or 11 books so far and there even though it was really fun even more fun than I would say the bobbyverse books in the beginning the first three
four books now I'm realizing that it's the same thing again and again every book it's like a different crisis but it's the marvel movie kind of thing you know what's going to happen after a while right like the world is going to end and there's this character who's going to save it I feel that way
the bobbyverse Dennis is doing an amazing job of it's not that kind of like world ending catastrophes all the time it's more about the a i agents own struggles and things like that and of course there are once in a while but not every book is about the same formula every book is
very different so that way I love it this is not hard science by any means but a lot of what he says is way more believable in a way that he explains how like a search drive would work or subbathomic communication would work I am not that deep into physics but it sort of makes sense to me and I
can feel like I do get it and it could work that way whereas a lot of science fiction more in the fantasy side is they don't explain how things work they just say oh we go through the wormhole but there's no explanation of how the wormhole works or anything like that so he strikes a good
balance between these two sides I think which keeps me engaged cool yeah I was working on a massive project at Google called wormhole and I still couldn't understand what they wanted to do anyway I think this concludes our episode and where can people find us are no
so first things I think you should go to metacast.app and that's where you can find our app in the footer there at the bottom you can find links to this podcast as well as our other podcast builders gonna build we've been sort of dormant on that as we have been focusing on the app but now
as we start to grind up our like marketing and all that I think we're going to start to become more active on that podcast as well and then Ilia does a really good write up which I haven't done in a while actually because I've been working that massive blog post and I was like should I send
it to newsletter or should I not but you do typically take our the more rambling or in the moment recordings like this one and compose them into concise more thoughtfully written narrative form and you publish them so I think you can do that as well there are newsletter links all of those links are right on metacast.app and if you want to write to us you can write it hello at metacast podcast.com we personally read every single email that comes to us unless you offer us to buy some
Bitcoin. Well we do read those two and then we mark them as well. Right and with that bye bye bye see you next time