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Comment by nanijoe | Hacker News Reader

The app is new..the biggest complaint, is that there is no way to delete stuff. There is.. ie , swipe from left to right on an item, and a delete button appears, something I thought was pretty familiar to most iPhone users (turns out I was wrong).

Right before I submitted the app (a second time) for review, I decided to ask the user if they wanted to upgrade to the full version every time they saved a bill...I forgot to also remove the buy button on the main menu, when a purchase was made in that particular instance. The user still got the full version, but as you can imagine, the presence of the buy button made it look as if the features were still unlocked.

I'm of course working on an update to fix those..and add a few new features.

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I haven't done any serious iOS programming yet (might do in the summer), but if I ever anted to release an app, you know what's the first thing I'd do?

    MAKE SURE APP RINGS HOME EVERY TIME IT OPENS TO SEE IF THERE IS 
    ANY URGENT MESSAGES I'D LIKE TO TELL ALL MY USERS.

I don't care the slightest if it's something Apple doesn't want you to do, or wants you to do over notification center, just do yourself a favor and create a direct channel between yourself and the customers (so that you can send them a message whenever you felt like).

If you had such channel, you could've told them (after an apology for the inconvenience it's caused) how to remove bills, and that you're working on the next version, and the buy button was a bug, and avoid 1-2 star reviews, and sell much much more (no one buys/download a 1.5 star app).

> I don't care the slightest if it's something Apple doesn't want you to do

Just to be clear, did you want this app to appear in the AppStore?

:) Well, there are rules, (official and unofficial) guidelines and "best practices". The first two, you can't break them, but you can break the third and still be in the App Store. I think an annoying direct channel falls in the third category. I've seen many apps/games do it. Two of them (of top of my head) are blockbusters and have sold tens of millions of copies combined: Doodle Jump & Jetpack Joyride. So, yes, you can do it and still be in the App Store.

Assuming they aren't annoyed by it and close it without reading so they can do what they wanted to do with the app.

Yes, we must be careful to use it sparingly and only in the extreme cases that could result in many negative reviews.

A real world example of how this can ruin your rating:

I use a text editor on OS X called 'Mellel'[1], which is available both in Mac App Store and as a direct purchase. It's excellent and supports RTL languages (Persian, in my case) better than any other text editor. There was a bug on OS X 10.7.4 that caused the cursor to disappear. It was a simple bug and the developers issued a notification to all non-App Store customers (they obviously have their emails) on how to remedy this issue, but it took them like 10 days to update the app on MAS, causing a few negative reviews.

[1]: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mellel/id415467848?mt=12

The swipe left to right to me is counter-intiutive, most of the apps I've come across it is swipe from right to left, and the button to delete appears on the right.

Although, testing with some apps right now it appears both ways works, but I have noticed that apps also generally include an edit button that then lets me select multiple items and do a particular action on them.

I have a similar problem... an android app where users complain about a missing feature which is available when tapping Menu. Amazing how many android users don't know about that key!

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