Hello! Here is a compilation of some important points about app submission, approval delays and other topics, which you might want to read before submitting your app, or while having trouble submitting your app:
*1. You have to submit your app.* Yes, I know you know that. But just to get the obvious out of the way -- in order to get approval, you have to submit your app. That means going to http://sandbox.orkut.com/Main#Developer and submitting it. If you don't do that, your application will not magically approve itself. *2. What's this appID business? Does my app have an ID even before being approved?* ** An app without an appID is a sad app, so yes, every app has an appID even if it hasn't been approved yet. To know the ID of your app, launch it (in sandbox or prod) and look at the URL on your browser's address bar. Your appID is the "appID=" parameter on the URL. It's that string of digits. Please mention your appID when you complain. If you don't mention that, we can't really find your application and won't have a clue what went wrong... *3. Sandbox is broken! What do I do?* Sandbox breaks sometimes, because it's very new, bleeding-edge code and may sometimes run into integration problems with other servers that are not entirely within our control. However, when sandbox is down, you have an alternative: Have you tried prod sandbox? *Prod sandbox* runs the same binary as production and has several of the production flags on, so it should give you a good environment for testing: http://prod.sandbox.orkut.com *4. How long is considered a "normal" time to wait for an approval?* Up to 1 week is normal. As listed in the Known Issues, AppReviewer is currently offline and we're running it manually every week or so. Therefore, it may take up to a week for AppReviewer to take a first look at your application, at which point you will receive an e-mail indicating whether your application was approved or not. *5. I've been waiting for 23 years, 8 months and 3 days for an approval. Is that normal?* If you find yourself waiting for more than 2 weeks and never got an e-mail from AppReviewer, something is very wrong. In this case, please check your spam box -- maybe your e-mail filtering backend doesn't like our friendly AppReviewer messages and sends them to your spam folder. If the AppReviewer e-mail is not there, please complain to us on the forum, and provide your appID so we can look into it and tell you what's going on. *6. I got an AppReviewer error. Now what?* You have to fix your application and submit it again. The message will tell you what's wrong with your application, and all you have to do is fix it. Okay, that's lie. The message is often a bit obscure. We're fixing that, I promise! Now, if the error is in a URL that your app uses, it's probably because we're having trouble fetching the asset from that URL. Please check that it's spelled right. If it's spelled right and you can access the asset yourself, then maybe your content provider is not reliable -- it may work for you now, but when we try to pull it, the server might be overloaded and giving us a "temporary error". Also, please take a look at "Common causes for AppReviewer failures" below. Now, if the URL error is on some strange internal orkut URL, something to do with a "gmodules" proxy, in that case it's our fault -- your app failed review because AppReviewer couldn't access our own internal cache. In the (increasingly unlikely) case that happens to you, please complain and try to submit your app again. *Common causes for AppReviewer failures:* 1. HTTP errors: your resources can't be fetched. Sure they may work now for you, but perhaps they are only available some of the time, and were offline when we tried to fetch them. Please switch to a reliable hosting service. 2. You are using a registered trademark in your app. You can't use "Google", "orkut", or any other trademark you don't own. So if your app is using any unauthorized trademarks, you will not get approval (and the error message won't really explain why). 3. Your app has objectionable content. 4. Your app redirects the user to another app or page, or does any other funny or suspicious trick with the browser. You are not allowed to do that. 5. Your app has a security breach which allows it to be exploited maliciously. 6. You are violating one or more of our Developer Guidelines<http://code.google.com/apis/orkut/docs/orkutdevguidelines.html>. We have automated tests that verify compliance to many of them. 7. A bug in AppReviewer. If you believe you've found an AppReviewer bug, we'd like to know about it! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "orkut Developer Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-orkut?hl=en.
