What to verify before you submit, from crash reporting to store listing, so launch day is boring in a good way.
Launch day should be uneventful. It usually is not, because these items get left to the last week. Here is the list, roughly in the order it should be done.
Four weeks out
- Crash reporting installed and verified by deliberately triggering a crash
- Analytics installed, with the three or four events you actually care about
- Privacy policy written, hosted, and linked from inside the app
- Developer accounts created and verified, which can itself take days
Two weeks out
- Tested on the oldest OS version you claim to support
- Tested on a small screen device, not only the newest large phone
- Tested on a poor connection, and with no connection at all
- Store listing written: description, keywords, screenshots for all required sizes
- Support email address that someone actually monitors
One week out
- Demo account created for reviewers if anything sits behind a login
- Push notification permissions requested at a sensible moment, not on first launch
- Onboarding tested by someone who has never seen the app
- A way to force an update later, for when you need to retire a broken version
Launch day
- Verify the live build from the store, not your test build. They are not always identical.
- Watch crash reporting for the first few hours.
- Have someone available to reply to reviews and support email.
- Do not push a marketing spend until you have confirmed the live version works.
The week after
Read every review, including the harsh ones. Early reviews are the highest quality product feedback you will ever receive, because they come from people who chose to install something new and cared enough to say what went wrong.