One question I often get is, “How hard is it to get an App approved by Apple?”.

The answer to this question I think is pretty simple… it’s really, really easy.

I know there is a lot of bad press out there about people having their apps rejected “for no apparent reason”.  If you believe this, you’re nuts!  Want proof that it’s easy?  No problem.  Here are my arguments.

1. At Apple’s last count there are over 140,000+ apps in the App Store!  Does that sound like a very strict approval process to you?
2. Look at all the apps out there that do little to nothing original.  Some seem to flat-out infringe on some pretty popular IP.  Yet, they are still available in the App Store.
3. The first submission of Faced was rejected (4 days after submission).

Whoa!  Faced was rejected and yet there is no hard feelings towards Apple?  Yep, that’s right.  Although the reason we received via email was a little vague, we did figure out exactly why our app was rejected pretty quickly.  Also, once we figured it out we realized if we had only read Apple’s document on “Tips for App Submission” , we wouldn’t have been rejected even once.

The bottom line is that the people who get rejected, end up getting rejected for one of the following reasons:

1. Their app crashes during testing.
2. Their app is incredibly offensive.
3. Their app uses a private API, or uses a framework that uses a private API.

When we submitted Faced, the average approval time was somewhere around two weeks.  Our app got rejected in about 4 days, we re-worked the app over a weekend and re-submitted.  It was about 4 days later that our app was accepted and available in the app store.

The moral of the story is this:  If you are thinking of (or have already started) writing an iPhone/Touch/iPad app, don’t worry about the approval process.  All you have to do is make sure you submit a rock solid application that doesn’t use any private API’s and isn’t incredibly offensive.  End of story.

Good luck!

After a little over a week in the Apple queue, Faced 1.1 is ready for you to download!  If you’ve already purchased Faced, then the App Store is probably already nagging you to download the update.  If you haven’t… what are you waiting for?!?

This update is mainly to tighten up the app in a few key areas.  Here’s a list of what is new.

• You can now copy your creations to the Camera Roll from the Gallery
• While you’re editing an image, you can move/delete any defect you’ve added to the picture already (not just the ones you’ve added in that particular section)
• Moving between snots/zitz/scars is much faster
• When you upload an image to Facebook and tag a user, their name is used in the tag line (e.g. “John Smith got Faced!”, instead of just “Somebody got Faced!”)
• Only the final version of your creation is saved to the gallery
• A few of the graphical headers were updated

This update really makes the app feel tight.  We liked it before, but after making some tweaks based on user feedback Faced is now even better.

We’ve got some other ideas brewing for our next release.  These will be added features, not just tweaks.  Hopefully we can get these out to you in a few weeks.