There's a version of "ready to launch" that lives in your head, and a version that lives in a punch list. Mine had been sitting at "basically done" for weeks. Then I worked through the list, and three unrelated things turned out to be standing in the way.
I sat down expecting to add a cookie consent banner, because that's just what you do before a launch, right? Instead I checked what TenderNest's websites actually used before writing any banner code.
The cookies I found were there to make sign-in and the site work, with no analytics or advertising cookies. After checking the guidance, I concluded that those essential uses didn't require a consent banner. That was one job I could take off the list without building anything.
The same audit turned up something I hadn't considered: I'd left the marketing site loading fonts from Google. Every visit made a request to another company before the visitor had read a word about TenderNest. I'd accepted that default without thinking about it. I moved the fonts onto my own site instead.
I hadn't built a banner, but I had removed an unnecessary third-party request. A more useful afternoon than the one I'd planned.
During a separate pre-beta check, I deliberately failed login to test the limit. When I moved on to password reset, I found that blocked too, even though I hadn't used it.
I fixed it and checked the two actions together. Someone who couldn't remember their password needed a working way back in. I wrote up that little detour in Locked out by my own rate limiter; it earned its own post rather than another page on this list.
Then came submission day, which I'd been treating as the easy part. Fill in some forms, tap Submit, done. I'd budgeted maybe twenty minutes.
App Store Connect first wanted a completed privacy label and a chosen price tier. I filled both in. For the privacy label, I checked what the shipped build actually collected, including its third-party code, rather than guessing from a list of permissions and dependencies.
Next: "you must add a subscription group localization." I'd already named my subscription tiers, but this was a separate label for the group itself. I found it, added it, and tried again.
I bundled the app version and the subscriptions together and hit submit. Apple said I needed an app version in the submission. The version I had was already tied up in a different review I'd submitted earlier that day. I cancelled that review, attached the version to the submission I wanted, and tried again.
New error: the subscription group couldn't be reviewed until I'd submitted an actual subscription. So I tried submitting one on its own. That attempt told me the first subscription for a new app had to go in with an app version.
I read the two messages back to back. Submit a subscription first. Don't submit that subscription on its own. I was following one instruction only to arrive at the other, and neither screen was making the missing step obvious.
Eventually I stopped treating the subscription and its group as the same item. I added the individual subscription alongside the app version and the group in one review submission. With all three together, it went through.
The workaround sounds simple written down. Finding it meant cancelling a review I'd already submitted, moving things around, and repeatedly wondering whether I'd made the submission less correct than it had been twenty minutes earlier.
By the end of that afternoon, I'd submitted both apps for review. Whatever was left, it wasn't this list.
