Following is a true story –

This is a story during the early days of my development career. My total experience of the job could be at most 3 months and I was handling an app that had over a million daily users. Not total downloads or total users, but a million daily users. One would argue some junior developer would not be skilled enough to handle such an app. But in total honesty, there was nothing complex in the app and I was mostly doing some maintenance work and adding some features here and there.

Part of the job was submitting the app to the Apple App Store for review. I had done the same a few times before but suddenly one day the app was rejected. The reason was somewhat like “App is not working on iPad with Wi-Fi connected to an IPv6 network”.

This is 2016 and researching the issue looking for solutions was of no use and it was a fairly new reason for rejection. Even worse, when I ran the app on an iPad with IPv6 connection everything worked.

4 rejections and 1 month later(app reviews used to take a week compared to 2 days now in 2023) I was already pulling the hair out of me junior head and taking less and less lunch breaks until I decided I need to forget everything I know and start fresh. First thing I noticed was the app used some old library to make a few web service calls. The culprit library here for my developer peeps was called “AFNetworking”.

1 hour and updating the library and some methods later I re submitted the app for approval and ta-da !!! This time it was approved. After a few days when the issue got more popular I could confirm that the library was indeed the cause of the rejection.

2 important lessons here –

“Swinging in the wind” can indeed sometimes help when nothing else does

When nothing is going your way, forget what you know and start with a clear mind.