The Screenshot That Un-Launched My App

My app got approved. Then I un-approved it myself. On purpose.

Here is what happened. Getting into the App Store is a gauntlet, and I had finally cleared it. The app was accepted, sitting in that lovely state where all I had to do was press a button and it would go live. Weeks of work, done. Press the button.

I did not press the button. I pulled it back instead, and put myself at the back of the line again.

The reason was the screenshots. To show an app in the store, you upload pictures of it in use. Mine looked great, because they showed the app doing its actual job: playing real videos from real creators I admire. And that was the problem. Those were real people's videos, real thumbnails, real names, used to sell my product, without any of them agreeing to it.

Nobody would have caught it. It would almost certainly have been fine. But "almost certainly fine" is a bad foundation to build a company on, especially a company whose entire promise is that it treats people carefully. Using someone's work to advertise mine, without asking, is exactly the kind of corner I do not want to be the kind of person who cuts.

So I built a fresh set of screenshots using an invented library. Made-up shows, made-up channels, a fictional family. Nothing real, nothing borrowed. Then I resubmitted the whole thing and waited again, for a change that a normal person would not even notice.

I think about this one a lot, because it is the cleanest example of a tradeoff every builder faces constantly and mostly resolves the lazy way: doing it right versus doing it fast. Fast said press the button. Right said go to the back of the line. The gap between them was a few days and a small amount of pride, and it was worth it, because the version of me that ships the borrowed screenshots is a slightly worse version of me, and those compound.

You will not get audited for most of the corners you cut. That is exactly why cutting them is tempting, and exactly why not cutting them is a decision about who you are, not who is watching.

I would rather wait a few extra days than build on someone else's work without asking.

I write Building in the Open about designing and shipping a real product in public, one honest week at a time.

See what I'm building → cubbyplaylist.com