Demystifying the Mobile App Publishing Process

If you’ve never published a mobile app in the app stores before, it’s difficult to imagine how it works. In this article, we’ll shed some light on the process and explain how we simplify it by taking care of the more complicated aspects for you.

We assume that you’ve created an app with webtoapp.design. Afterwards, once you’ve tested your app preview, the publishing process begins. So let’s dive into how that works!

Theoretical Outline of the Process

Registering Developer Accounts

The first step you’ll have to complete is registering a Googleand Apple developer account, which is required to publish an app in the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store respectively. Google charges a one-time fee of $25 for that, while it’s $99/year for the Apple developer account. These fees go directly to Google/Apple, so we have no influence on them. But those are the only additional costs for publishing your app, everything else is already included in our pricing.

Some other website to app converters offer publishing your app in their developer account. We can only advise against that for multiple reasons:

• It’s against Google’s and Apple’s terms of service, which can lead to your app being removed from the app stores.

• You have no control over your app store listing. The owner of the developer account could make any changes or even delete it. You can’t update the app nor the description or other aspects of the app store listing. You couldn’t even switch to a different app developer.

• You can’t set the publisher/developer name shown in the app stores, since it will show the name of the actual account owner.

• Since the account owner probably publishes lots of apps, there’s a risk of one of his other apps violating the app store guidelines. That can lead to the entire developer account being banned, which means your app would be removed from the app stores.

Google and Apple do not give second chances and often make convictions based on association. Therefore you should avoid such risks at any cost, as it could endanger any of your future app projects.

As you can see, there’s plenty of reasons to create your own developer account. Even if you think Apple/Google won’t notice the account sharing, you should still create your own developer account so that your name or your company's name is listed as the app publisher in the app stores. As mentioned before, we guide you through creating your developer account and don’t support any account sharing, as we don’t want to expose you to these risks.

Configuring the App Store Listing

Once you’ve registered a developer account, you’ll be able to configure the app store listing (the information that’s shown when people view and download your app in the app store). This includes things like:

• Your app description

• App screenshots

• Contact information

• The age rating of your app

• Privacy policy/information

Uploading Your App

Next, we upload your iOS app and give you the file you need to upload your Android app. Once again, we handle the technical stuff and guide you through the remaining steps.

Submitting Your App for Review

All apps need to be tested by the Google and Apple reviewers. They try out the app and make sure that it complies with the app store’s guidelines. If necessary, they will ask for clarification or request changes to the app. But don’t worry, we have plenty of experience with the app review process and will help you pass it.

The review process takes some time though, so you should plan that you need to wait for around 1 to 2 weeks.

Once your app has been approved, it can be downloaded from the app stores!

How it Works in Practice

Even the outline we gave above probably seems overwhelming — that’s normal though, so don’t worry. Here’s how the publishing process works in practice, where you’ll be guided through all necessary steps one by one.

In your webtoapp.design dashboard you’ll see a timeline that always shows you the next steps that are necessary to publish your app in the app stores. To be exact, there’s one timeline for publishing your app in the Google Play Storeand one for the Apple App Store. The timelines consist of steps that either link to a guide or are completed automatically by us when you click on them.

Here’s an example for a task that gets completed automatically: Creating certificates and uploading your app to Apple App Store. This would normally require you to have a macOS computer where you set up Xcode and the entire app development framework. Then you’d have to compile the app, sign it with the correct certificates and upload it to the App Store. Luckily for you we’ve taken care of that, so we can automatically create the correct certificates for you and build the app on our server, so you don’t need to worry about any of this technical stuff.

And here’s an example for task that has a guide: Filling out your app’s app store listing. Above, we’ve mentioned the various aspects this includes. You can quickly see why we can’t take care of this for you: We have nowhere near your expertise on your website/app, so we couldn’t write an app description as well as you nor do we know about how you protect your users’ privacy. In cases like these, it makes a lot more sense for us to help you instead of trying to complete it for you. We help you with our extremely detailed step-by-step guides. They literally document (with screenshots!) every click you need to make to complete the task. For more complicated topics like the app privacy questionnaire we provide additional information and explanations to make it a breeze for you.

Here’s a screenshot of such a guide — you can see it’s very detailed and clearly explains every step.

Summing it up

In conclusion, you don’t need to be afraid of the app store publishing process if you have a competent partner by your side. With our guides, our automation of the technical steps and our human support you can be sure that your app will get published with ease!