When it comes to apps, the seventh time’s the charm

I blinked twice, as if that would somehow make the little red dot disappear.

Rejected. For the sixth time.

Banging my forehead on my laptop keyboard, I let out a cry of pure frustration. This is what a whole summer of squinting into a screen of code had led to.

Ever think about what goes into getting an app approved by the App Store? It isn’t a Jetpack Joyride.

This summer, I spent seven weeks at Make School Summer Academy in Sunnyvale, where students learn how to design, code and ship their own original iOS app. With the help of the instructors at Make School, I programmed an app called GeoRecipe that allows users to explore recipes on a map, specifically placed on the location where the food originated from. For example, if you search up Brittany, France, on the map of my app, you’ll see my sister’s homemade dark chocolate macaron recipe, because Brittany is where macarons originated.

But before I could create the next big thing, my app had to be approved by the App Store.

Getting an app approved, I learned, was a bit like writing a story for the Falcon. Your work is sent back and forth in an “edit-revise” cycle until the person on the other end is happy with the product. I was working on my sixth “revise” and was confident that this was the final bug.

As I moped around complaining about how my email account had been flooded by Apple rejection letters, my friends gave me sympathetic looks and gently patted me on the back, telling me that I still had one day left to fix the bugs.

But I wasn’t about to let the last 24 hours at Make School escape me, like the bugs in my code had.

I headed back to my laptop, and entranced myself in code mode. Fix, run, crash. Fix, run, crash. But to my disappointment, both my code and my mind were trapped in an infinite loop.

I was so close that I could almost see my cupcake icon next to Flappy Bird on the App Store. But after two hours of trying what seemed like every single possibility, my code would still not run. I stood up, stomped to the door and walked outside the tech center to get some fresh air.

“What am I gonna do … Think, Caitlyn, think!” I murmured to myself as I paced back and forth across the patio.

Suddenly, I had an epiphany. I raced back inside, dove straight to my laptop, and changed one line of code in the for-loop of my query. Then, I ran it.

For the first time in three hours, the code ran perfectly. Teeming with excitement, I changed the version number on my project from 1.6 to 1.7, and began the process to submit to the App Store for the seventh time.

For the next 12 hours, I sat in front of my laptop, repeatedly clicking the refresh button. But every time, the same little yellow dot with the “Waiting For Review” label would appear, until I was so tired that I fell asleep with my head on my keyboard.

When I woke up the next day, which was also coincidentally the Make School graduation day, I wiped the drool off my keyboard and dragged my mouse to the refresh button. As I strained to see through my crusted eyelids, for the first time, a little green dot appeared in my view: approved. I sprang up from my seat, and began doing the Snoopy happy dance in my room.

And though the excitement soon receded, every time I saw someone download or use my app, which is now available on the App Store for free, I relived my spark of initial pride. Whether it was my sister uploading her macaron recipe or watching a friend navigate its interface, those moments made my long struggle for approval worth it.