AstroAid V2.0 was rejected by Apple this morning. Sigh. The fix took about 3 minutes, and the app is now back to “waiting for review”. i.e. another 10 days of waiting. Continue on to read about the fix, or stop right here if you’re not a geek.
It seems that Apple took offense to where I was storing the database and downloaded images. In iOS, each application has it’s own private little file kingdom. I made the mistake of storing the database and images in the Documents folder for the app. This is a no-no, apparently, because any documents in there are backed up in iCloud. This means that any documents Apple finds you depositing there must be small, and must be such that if they are lost, then they cannot be recovered.
The database used by AstroAid, and any downloaded images, are relatively easily reconstituted by downloading them again. For such documents, Apple wants you to store them elsewhere: in the Caches folder. Files in this folder are not backed up and, if you are running low on file space (flash memory), iOS will delete such files to make more space available for other applications.
So that was the change: where the database and images are stored. Two lines of code were changed.
It’s irritating to have to wait all over again for a another review, but I’m reasonably confident it will pass muster this time. I did learn something new.