Blogs

Last Week Last week was about marketing preparation after the App Store approval finally landed. Android was already live on Google Play, iOS had cleared review, and the center of gravity moved away from building the MVP toward making Shokken look trustworthy enough for real operators to evaluate. That meant working on the surfaces around the app: the website, app store listings, screenshots, Google/search presence, social profiles, and physical flyers for local outreach....

Last Week Last week was the milestone I had been waiting on: Shokken finally cleared Apple’s App Store review. Android was already live on Google Play, but iOS had been stuck behind repeated review rejections around the short-duration paid access products. After deleting the old one-day and three-day product records from App Store Connect, the review path finally cleared. That approval changes the shape of the work. The MVP development effort is effectively done....

Last Week Last week was about simplifying the iOS review surface. After several rounds of App Store review friction over Shokken’s one-day and three-day paid access options, I removed the short-duration products from the submitted build and kept the iOS purchase path to a monthly subscription. That was not the product shape I originally wanted, but it made the submission easier for Apple to evaluate and reduced the chance that the same subscription-duration argument would keep blocking the app....

Last Week Last week stepped away from the App Store review loop and focused on how I manage AI coding agents while building Shokken. The practical point was simple: agents can be useful, but they have to be treated like contributors, not trusted like deterministic tools. Clear instructions, tests, CI, and review are what make their output usable. That tooling discipline still matters, but this week moved straight back to the iOS submission path....

Last Week Last week was about accepting the practical shape of the App Store review problem. Apple had rejected the iOS submission again over the short-duration access products, and after a direct call with App Review, the path forward became clearer: stop defending the non-renewing subscription interpretation and rebuild the one-, two-, and three-day passes as consumable in-app purchases. That work still needs to happen. Android remains live on Google Play, iOS is still blocked by App Store review, and the short-pass conversion will touch RevenueCat, the paywall, the app code, the backend, and the database....

Last Week Last week, the iOS review process had narrowed to a single blocker: Apple’s reviewer still objected to Shokken’s one-day and three-day paid access options. Android is already live on Google Play, and the current iOS development work for this submission is done, but production App Store access is still held up by the way short-duration access is represented. At that point, I still wanted to defend the product model....

Last Week Last week was about the infrastructure underneath the release process. My old self-hosted GitHub runner had filled its disk with Docker leftovers, so I replaced the single persistent runner with a fixed pool of disposable runner containers on a larger Proxmox-backed Ubuntu VM. That made the CI/CD setup cleaner, less congested, and better suited for the heavier checks I want to keep adding around Shokken. The product goal did not change, though....

Last Week Last week was about configuration management and release control. The App Store review fixes were mostly done, but the next iOS submission was still blocked by a practical release-management problem: unfinished work inside the mobile binary cannot be cleanly hidden without feature flags. Android is already live on Google Play. iOS is still waiting on the third production submission, and I still expect to get that submission out by the end of next week once the remaining rough edges are cleaned up....

Last Week Last week I went through Apple’s second iOS rejection line by line and separated the feedback into concrete buckets: metadata cleanup, legal links, pricing explanation, short-duration paid access, account deletion, and general release-readiness debt. By the end of that pass, the shape of the work was clear. Most of the review items had either a direct fix or a direct answer, and the one large product requirement, account deletion, had already turned into real implementation work across the app and backend....

Last Week Last week was quiet by design, or at least quiet in terms of app progress. I had friends visiting, spent the week showing them around, and did not make meaningful progress on the iOS rejection. The useful part of that pause was that it clarified the next order of operations. First, I needed to come back to the App Store review feedback and handle it directly. After that, I needed to start treating marketing as real launch work instead of something I could postpone indefinitely....