App expired on iTunes connect

Development on WhatSAB was going a little slow during the last months due to personal and work reasons. During this time Apple contacted me via automatic mails notifying me that the app I added in iTunesConnect would be deleted if no binary was uploaded in the next weeks. A second email followed 7 days before expiration.

I didn’t give much on that, as I thought

Well, I can always re-add the app once I am ready!

Wrong! The final mail notifying me about the deletion of the app also told me that this app name, identifier and SKU could not be used again by any app. This came as a big surprise, maybe I overlooked that bit of info in the first mails, maybe it wasn’t there.

An app name change would not be a good thing, I already bought this domain, registered the Twitter account and used the name everywhere inside the app. So I contacted Apple and told them about the situation. They reacted some hours later, telling me that they made an one-time-exception and restored the app. I now have another 130 days to upload a binary of WhatSAB.

So before adding the app to iTunes connect be sure you can deliver a binary within 130 days. I read some posts on the internet that said you can upload a binary and developer reject it to circumvent this time limit, but I would not recommend that as that for sure isn’t a feature 😉