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iPhone App – Finally!

WorshipPlanning.com iPhone AppThe big news we have been waiting for has finally arrive. The WP iPhone app was approved by Apple this afternoon, and we are delighted! It is now available in the App Store (just search for “Worship Planning”). Once installed, you may notice the version number on the splash screen to be 0.9rc2. If we had our druthers, it would have said version 1.0. But the source code is virtually identical. In the confusion to get Apple to approve our app (see our June 15th blog post), this 0.9rc2 version was submitted instead of version 1.0. Again, they both contain the exact same code, just a different version number.

What you can expect from this app is functionality similar to MyWP. Future releases will certainly contain functionality that more closely resembles the main site. But for this release we wanted an app that had features used by both Planners and Helpers.

So, feel free t

o install and give it a try. We look forward to your feedback to help shape the future releases. And, as always, if you have any questions or issues, feel free to give us a call (1-877-399-3342) or send us an email (support[at]worshipplanning.com).

O iPhone App, Where Art Thou?

I know many of you are wondering this exact question. The short answer is that it appears to be “stuck” in Apple. Read on….

Back in February and March, a few dozen WorshipPlanning.com users beta tested the iPhone app we developed. By the time beta testing was done, it was receiving very positive reviews by most beta testers. On March 24th, we submitted it to the App Store for review. A few days later, Apple moved it from the initial “Pending” queue, to the the “In Review” queue. For 8 weeks, it sat in this queue, despite my email pleas for Apple to do something with it. We would have even settled for a rejection so that we could fix whatever the problem was and resubmit it. But Apple only responded to one of our emails, stating something to the effect of “Don’t bug us. We’ll tell you when we are done.”

On May 27th (9 weeks after the original submission), we removed the seemingly-stalled app from the review process, and resubmitted it. Our hope was that by resubmitting, the app would not fall into the mysterious black hole that the previous submission had. A few days later, it entered the “In Review” status (again) and we detected they were actually testing the app (we got an assignment response notification). That was about two weeks ago. At the time of this blog post, the app is still “In Review”, and our frustration is on the rise again.

So, what is our next steps? If there is no change in status by this Friday, we will begin sending emails to Apple in hopes they give us some indication of what is going on, or what is wrong with our app. If we ever find that out, it will be our highest priority to get it fixed. In the meantime, we will resume our plans to develop Android and Blackberry apps, as well as the Facebook app. And, of course, we will be praying about it.

I sincerely apologize for the delays. We are so very excited to make this app available to you.