After your app is live

Your app is live. Most of what follows takes care of itself — but a few things need you, and one of them can take your app off the App Store if it's missed.

Renew your Apple membership. Every year.

The Apple Developer Program is $99 a year, and it is not a formality.

If it lapses, your app is removed from the App Store. Not suspended, not hidden — removed from sale, and it stays off until you renew. Existing users keep what's on their phone, but nobody new can download it and updates stop.

Three minutes of prevention:

• Turn on auto-renew in your Apple Developer account
• Keep the card on file current — an expired card is the usual cause
• Make sure the renewal reminders go to an address someone still reads. A launch handled by a staff member who has since left is how this gets missed.

Google Play has no annual fee. It does periodically ask you to re-verify your account details, and it emails the account owner to do it — same advice about a live inbox.

Two different kinds of update

Worth being clear about, because it decides whether something takes minutes or a fortnight.

Content updates are automatic. New listings, price changes, sold properties, new agents, edited photos — the app reads them live from your website. Publish in WordPress and it's in the app immediately. No new build, no store review, nothing to release.

App updates are a new build. Anything that changes how the app itself looks or works — a new screen, a colour change, a bug fix — means we build, you test it, and it goes through store review again like the first release.

Expect one technical update a year

Apple and Google both raise their minimum requirements annually. Google enforces a target Android version each year, and Apple requires new submissions to be built with a recent toolchain. An app that never gets rebuilt eventually can't be updated and, in Google's case, stops being offered to people on newer phones.

Apple also removes apps that haven't been updated in a long time and see very little use.

So a maintenance build once a year is normal and expected, and we'll tell you when yours is due. It's usually invisible to your users.

Tell us before you change your website

The app talks to one fixed address. These will break it for everyone, at once:

• Changing your domain, or moving between www and non-www — see the warning on the website page
• Moving hosting, if the site address changes with it
• Switching off or deleting either of the two plugins
• Letting your HTTPS certificate expire
• Adding a firewall or security plugin that blocks /wp-json/

None of them are off-limits. They just need a heads-up so we can point a new build at the new address and get it through review before the old one stops working. Told after the fact, your app is down for however long store review takes.

Renaming your company is worth a mention too: the app's ID can never change, but the name shown on the store can, and so can the icon and colours.

Look after the credentials

The three download-once files from the checklist — both Apple .p8 keys and the Play service account JSON — should be somewhere you can still find them in three years. A password manager, not a laptop's Downloads folder.

None of them expire. If one is ever lost or you'd rather rotate it, you delete it in the console and create a replacement, then send us the new one; it's a half hour, not a crisis.

When staff change

If whoever set this up leaves, take them off the accounts — Apple: Users and Access; Google: Users and permissions.

Don't remove or lock out the Apple Account Holder. It's a specific role, only one person holds it, and transferring it needs the current holder to be reachable and signed in. If that person is leaving, transfer it before their last day.

Reviews and ratings

Both stores let you reply to reviews publicly, from App Store Connect and the Play Console. Replying to the unhappy ones, quickly and plainly, moves ratings more than anything else you can do. A reviewer can edit their star rating after you respond, and often does.

If a review describes something actually broken, send it to us.

Getting help

Reach us the way you always have. Useful things to include: your app version (Settings → About in the app), the device and OS version, and a screenshot.

For anything urgent that touches the stores — a rejected update, a removal notice, an expiry email you don't understand — forward it as-is. The exact wording usually tells us what's happened.

What to send us

Nothing routine. Just get in touch before any of the website changes above, and forward anything that arrives from Apple or Google that you'd like a translation of.