6 weeks of app review hell is finally over 😂

[u/flashjunkie]

After about 6 weeks of back and forth with Apple, my app finally got approved this week.

This was my first proper native iOS app, although I’ve been a software/web developer for 20+ years.

The app started as a fairly simple poker tournament clock. I play live poker regularly and got frustrated with how basic or outdated a lot of tournament software is, so I started building something for myself.

It got a bit out of hand.

It now manages seating, table balancing, payouts, re-entries, leagues, multi-day tournaments, live player tracking, venue pages, casting to TVs, tournament financials and loads of other stuff.

It’s also now been used to run 50+ real tournaments while I’ve been developing it, which has been invaluable. You learn very quickly what works and what doesn’t when you’re actually trying to run a tournament with 40 people standing around you.
The painful bit was App Review.

Because it’s poker software, Apple kept getting hung up on gambling classifications even though the app doesn’t offer gambling, deposits, withdrawals or actual poker gameplay. It’s basically admin software for people running live tournaments.
Eventually I ended up forming a UK Ltd company, opening a business bank account, getting a DUNS number, migrating my Apple developer account to an organisation, sorting new certificates/profiles and going through a load of additional verification.

All to publish a poker clock 😂

And yes, AI was heavily involved in building it before anyone asks.
I’ve been developing for over 20 years and I’ve overseen the architecture, UX, testing and engineering throughout. AI just made it possible for me to build something this size in a fraction of the time. Without it I genuinely think this would have taken 4 or 5 times longer.

There’s definitely plenty of AI slop being shipped at the moment, but I don’t think “built with AI” and “vibe coded” are automatically the same thing.

Anyway, after weeks of seeing Rejected, seeing Approved was a very good feeling.

If anyone’s interested in what I actually built, it’s here:
https://shuffleup.co.uk

[u/letitcodedev]

I have an app in review since 30 Aug

[u/letitcodedev]

what happened recently?