OK, I'll admit it. I'm not a patient creature. In fact I'm not even close to one. Oh sure, I can wait patiently for some things, though after Christmas passes each year, I even start to get impatient for that. No, today what I'm speaking about is the iTunes App Store.
Last Thursday, I finally put in the last bit of time that I needed in order to get my latest app into the App Store. I started it in May of 2010 or so. Got so far as to get all of the various state tax brackets put in place even, although I hadn't coded the nuances of actually performing the state calculations. I had the federal calculations, and those for the small handful of states which mimic the federal calculations exactly (except for bracket and rate numbers). Those were working perfectly. Then I realized that market timing was not on my side for a June release. After all, November is a much better time to release a tax related product than June, ya know when you're thinking about not making the mistakes on your taxes that you made last time around.
However, November came and went, and so did December, January, February, March, April, and once again May. What was at the time referred to as iPaycheck had been left in the dust as other app ideas came to fruition, all of which met the same fate. Development got started, life got in the way. Since I had a day job and a few nighttime projects, it wasn't a big deal.
Then this past October started rolling around. I'd been doing some 1099 work, looking to turn my little business profitable after 2 years of effort. One of the projects they had me working on was an iPhone App, and when I wrapped that up, I returned to my own App. All I had to do was figure out how to implement the various state algorithms which turned out to not be a big deal.
I finally got the last few bugs worked out and shipped the App off to the App Store on the 3rd of November. Watching that week tick by in which 97% of new apps are reviewed can be slower than molasses in January in Canada. What was worse is the one day that it took to going from "In Review" to being "Ready for Sale". That finally happened yesterday. Given the utility of the app, I figure I'll get some decent sales out of it, after all, most everyone gets a paycheck, but since there were only a few hours left in the day by the time it finally showed up in the App Store lists, I wasn't expecting much for that first day. But man, talk about ending up with a day for Sales Report generation to take a long time. It was after noon today before I could see that in the few hours it was available I sold one copy of it. Looking forward to getting today's report tomorrow morning!
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