Mmmelon for iPhone available!

announce
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Apple has finally approved our iOS app. It’s native but uses meteor as backend with DDP protocol. It was really hard creating such a big app but hope many people will enjoy it.

Here’s the announcement post and you can download it for free on the App Store

App requires an account at mmmelon.com as apple asked us to removed register option inside the app :frowning:

I’m open to sharing how I did things on the app. I’ve written a post about it but it’s only in spanish (great if you can read spanish or try google translate, sorry) but feel free to ask. I’ve expended long hours with some features and maybe I can help if you find the same issues.

3 Likes
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Congratulations!

What do you mean apple asked you to remove register option inside the app? Do you mean that people need to register on the web before they are allowed to use the app?

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Yes, they have to register on the web before using the app. Basecamp follows the same plan. The message from apple was: “Apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the App, such as a “buy” button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book, will be rejected” and they included an screenshot of the register view.

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Wow! That’s a surprise. Has anyone else experienced the same problem? Could it be because your app is not free?

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Yes, it’s because we have paid plans and we don’t use apple In App Purchases. We can’t use IAP because we can’t integrate it with our own system. Bigs like spotify, dropbox… support it but I’m not even sure how they do it.

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I take it, j3k0/cordova-plugin-purchase and in-app-purchase npm package did not work for you?

I am asking because I am walking in your footsteps and will need e-commerce very soon for my app.

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We did a native app, not cordova but you’ll find the same issues if you require subscriptions. Without subscriptions it’s really easy to add IAP support and Apple will take 30% of the money.

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I’m curious about your desktop apps, did you use Electron for those? If so, how much of an extra workload was it to build the desktop version?

The site looks great, only thing I find weird is your pricing table, which is arranged in descending order. For a second, I thought your prices start at €199.

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Yeah, we used electron for desktop apps. We had to change some things on the app and added desktop features like badges, key commands… It was hard finding how to do that, packaging the app for all the platforms… but now we have a node script that does all the work. Working with file download/upload was hard too but I can’t share more details :smile: