What took the app so long?

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If you’ve been following Man Flow Yoga for a while, you’ll probably recall that the Man Flow Yoga app was first mentioned sometime in the fall of 2014. At the point we had no release date planned. We were going over the specs of what the app would be able to accomplish, including features, sections, and other capabilities. Finding a good developer can be difficult, and those good developers are usually quite expensive or really busy. Fortunately for me, I had a friend of mine from college contact me about making the app, instead of having to seek one out myself. I won’t say how much it cost to develop the app, but I will say that I did not have to pay anywhere near as much as most people who want to build an app have to. (I have a friend who was quoted $200,000 for an app with capabilities similar to mine.)

We planned on having the app done in March, so that’s what I told you guys. I assumed that if I could finish the content for the app and give them a few days to input everything into the app that we would be able to release on time. Whoops. I had the photo shoot for the app done in March. That photo shoot was one of the more grueling photo shoots that I’ve done. It lasted about 2.5 hours, I was sore for days afterwards. A couple days after that, I spent about a day going through the photos and selecting the ones we would ultimately use. (There were about 1200 photos to go through. You get really sick of looking at photos of yourself if you’re in the social media fitness biz.) About a week after that, and hearing the critique from some of my clients and friends, I realized that the photos were crap. Too dark. So we had to reschedule the photo shoot. We did everything again, which set us back about 2 weeks, and also meant more money spent on photography. Eventually, we got the photos we wanted.

The next issue was the busy-ness of the developer. He was working on multiple projects. Business had increased since we had scheduled production of the app back in fall of 2014, which meant that he didn’t have as much time to work on the app as we had originally expected. Despite this, he was still extremely responsive and relatively quick. We were making good progress on the app. We were still behind, to be sure, but I expected that we would be able to publish the app by May, or June at the latest. Then we hit our next roadblock. This one was pretty funny.

The first version of the app was done, and we were ready to test it out. So my developer went to his Apple Developer Account, typed in the name of the app…. and found out that it had already been taken. Some SOB had taken my app name! How dare he! Furious, I sent an email to apple. I even started reaching out to all of my Apple contacts (fortunately there is an Apple office in Austin, where I live, and I have had private sessions with some of the employees). They were extremely responsive in getting me to the right forms and suggesting what exactly to type, but I was still at the mercy of an automated response system. After a week or waiting, we received word back. However, they didn’t understand my problem. I needed to speak with them directly. After a few days, I was able to get a phone number and talk with someone. I explained the situation, showed them my credentials as the owner of Man Flow Yoga, that someone was using my app name, and that I would like them to GTFO… cease and desist.

A day or two later, I was cc:ed on the cease and desist letter from the Apple Legal team. There was only problem. I recognized the email address of the individual that we were sending the cease and desist letter to. It was my own GD developer. Yup. I sent myself a cease and desist letter. It turns out that apple does not recognize space characters in app titles. The app was originally titled “ManFlow Yoga”, by my developer, because he did not realize that the brand name was actually “Man Flow Yoga”, with a space between ‘man’ and ‘flow’. When we went to change the app name to “Man Flow Yoga”, with a space between the ‘man’ and ‘flow’, we were actually attempting to create a duplicate entry of the app which we had already created. Smart.

After that, it was actually smooth sailing. We created a total of 11 versions of the app. We made necessary updates / fixes about 2-3  times per week, and we spoke every other day. The Manbassadors helped me test the app, and then we submitted our final version of the app to Apple. It took a little less than a week for Apple to approve it. I got the email that switched the app’s status to “pending developer release” on Friday, and then spent the day setting up everything for a Sunday morning release, including setting up the marketing and creating a guide for using the app. You guys had waited long enough, and I didn’t want to delay any further.

Hope you enjoyed hearing about that! Download the Man Flow Yoga app by clicking this link to take you to the Man Flow Yoga App in the Apple App Store. You can learn about all of the features of the app and how to use it by clicking here.