There’s a special kind of purgatory that comes from submitting your app to the App Store. It’s the modern-day equivalent of sending your kid off to their first day of school–you’ve dressed it up, fed it well, double-checked its backpack for bugs, and now… you wait. And wait. And refresh App Store Connect like it owes you money.
I submitted JournalPlus (my lovingly crafted, slightly obsessive ode to daily themes and intentional living) to Apple for review. And now I am absolutely not pacing back and forth refreshing my email every 3 minutes like a sane person.
This is the part no one tells you about in the indie dev stories. They tell you about the design, the code, the user onboarding flows–but not about the emotional death spiral that is “Waiting for Review.”
Meanwhile, my brain has chosen to cope in the only way it knows how: frantically making a list of all the things I’m going to fix once it’s approved. You know, because it’s totally rational to make a post-launch roadmap before you’ve even launched.
So far the list includes:
- Better onboarding animations (because what if the confetti isn’t whimsical enough?)
- A celebratory “YOU DID IT” llama when you complete a daily action
- A long overdue dark mode easter egg (👀)
- Tweaking that one shadow that’s 2% off and haunts me
- Thinking about Android. Again. Briefly. And then closing the tab.
- Writing another blog post to distract myself from refreshing the status again.
Anyway, this post is mostly a stall tactic, but also a little time capsule of this oddly magical/frustrating moment. If you’ve been here, you know. And if you haven’t–just wait.
Literally. Just wait.
– Jesse 👨💻⏳📱
Probably refreshing App Store Connect right now