[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built a tool to get "Your app was approve...
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Show HN: I built a tool to get "Your app was approved/rejected "
alerts on Slack
Works for Android and iOS workflows, currently. Looking for
feedback, suggestions, and maybe opportunities I'm not seeing?
Author : rogerluan
Score : 71 points
Date : 2023-11-09 09:51 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (statused.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (statused.com)
| topaztee wrote:
| its not immediately clear that this helps you know whether your
| android/iphone apps have been released. i would change the
| headline.
| rogerluan wrote:
| That's great feedback! You mean change the headline here on
| Hacker News, or the overall messaging shown on the landing
| page?
|
| What would you suggest instead? I thought "No more 'Is the app
| live yet?'" would be clear enough, but I guess not
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Seems oddly over-specific. Don't they send mails when it's
| approved/rejected? So is this basically a mail-filter connecting
| to slack? Just that it's using an API-key. How save is this API?
| How much can one screw up things or steal data with that key? And
| it seems rather expensive for such a one-trick task.
|
| Maybe add some more signals to get a real value for the customer,
| like a real mail-filter, RSS and other newsfeeds (which is
| popular here) or some dozen more APIs.
| rogerluan wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback!
|
| I agree with your points. The point of gathering the API key is
| to actually be able to provide a lot more information in the
| future, such as some light data science (analytics) into your
| releases, and maybe expand to other areas (e.g. taking actions
| from the Slack messages themselves).
|
| What do you mean with "like a real mail-filter"?
|
| The RSS feature is kinda on the roadmap but I haven't gotten
| any feedback about users wanting that type of integration.
| Incoming webhooks is higher up in the list, so users can
| trigger internal CI actions upon receiving requests to such
| webhooks.
|
| Any other type of APIs you'd like to see this tool covering? :)
| zombiesatemydev wrote:
| I'm curious: how does it get the review status from Play? I
| couldn't find this in Google's API anywhere.
| kitallis wrote:
| For Play Store, it specifically mentions that it only does:
|
| > When you submit a new build to one of the tracks (internal,
| alpha, beta, or production), they go through different
| statuses, e.g. "In Progress", "Completed", "Halted", etc. Each
| of these will send a new notification to your team.
| zombiesatemydev wrote:
| Ah, I misunderstood... I thought it somehow had full review
| details. Thanks for the gentle explanation!
| rogerluan wrote:
| Yes, thank you!
|
| I plan to add phased rollout user distribution too, so your
| team gets an update when the app rolls out to e.g. 5% of your
| users - 15% - 50%, etc...
| dewey wrote:
| You can create an email address for a specific Slack channel in
| Slack directly (https://slack.com/help/articles/206819278-Send-
| emails-to-Sla...), then it's just a matter of setting up a GMail
| filter to forward these mails to that address.
|
| Not sure digging up your Slack, Google, Apple API keys is
| faster...and probably also more of a hassle for compliance than
| just using Slack and Email which are already there.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Isn't that email also used for any admin specific actions? Like
| password reset urls?
| dewey wrote:
| No, it's a dedicated email you can set up for any channel,
| it's usually something like "channelname-
| somerandomcharacters@example.slack.com". On the GMail side
| you'd just set it up to only forward things that have the
| subject line you want like " _Rejected_ " etc.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| > On the GMail side you'd just set it up to only forward
| things that have the subject line you want like "Rejected"
| etc.
|
| Ah, ok. That's the part I missed.
|
| I would still be a bit worried about the security of it all
| if this were a big company though, but it's maybe doable
| for smaller ones?
| da768 wrote:
| Many companies block forwarding rules.
| dewey wrote:
| Probably less than companies allowing employees to
| generate API keys for Slack, Play Store and App store.
| nedrylandJP wrote:
| Just to be clear, the first method only works on paid plans.
| rogerluan wrote:
| That is definitely one way to solve this specific problem,
| you're right!
|
| Although the future of Statused holds more than just forwarding
| emails to Slack. I intend to add support to other "channels",
| such as Teams, Discord and Telegram, as well as other types of
| integrations such as incoming webhooks, so a status update
| could directly trigger a custom action in your CI/CD pipeline,
| for example "detect the app has finished processing, then
| submit it for review".
|
| On top of that, I don't think you get those emails for every
| Google Play changes that are made to your release, so not sure
| if that would work. Again, this might work, but I'm really not
| sure.
|
| You have a point with those concerns about sharing API keys.
| But this has become pretty standard and devs share those keys
| with a bunch of services already, such as as with CI systems,
| app store user review services, sometimes ASO monitoring tools
| even.
|
| The FAQ page highlights which permissions the API keys need:
| https://statused.com/faq#which-permissions-does-my-google-pl...
|
| Thanks for raising these points! It's valuable feedback to
| understand how people perceive this product!
| kitallis wrote:
| This is cool!
|
| I built a similar open-source thing a few months ago which pulls
| in a lot more information and you can even control things on the
| store through Slack commands: https://appstoreslackbot.com
|
| Currently, it only works for iOS and is pull-based.
| rogerluan wrote:
| This is amazing!! Congrats on putting together all that
| functionality!
|
| How many users are using that service? How come you decided to
| make it 100% free?
|
| Your website is beautiful btw! I thought about building my tool
| as a Slack bot but thought that then it would be too limited to
| only Slack. I intend to add other types of workflows in the
| future, such as webhooks (to trigger special workflows in your
| CI) and a RSS feed :)
|
| I'd love to connect with you if you wanna work together on
| something! t.me/rogerluan
| kitallis wrote:
| We have around 10 users right now since we haven't marketed
| it too much. But would love to spread the word around.
|
| We built this in about a week as it mostly piggybacks on a
| critical piece of infrastructure behind
| https://www.tramline.app, and hence kind of runs by itself.
|
| So we didn't really care for adding pricing to it. Tramline
| is what we _really_ build :)
|
| The service itself just currently happens to respond
| primarily as a Slackbot, but that's just an implementation
| detail and can be tweaked.
|
| Would love to connect, let me ping you on telegram!
| rogerluan wrote:
| I checked Tramline and it sounds like a great tool! It
| definitely deserves more attention!
| gauravphoenix wrote:
| How long did it take you to build this end-to-end? (including
| landing page)
| rogerluan wrote:
| So, I put together a hacked version of this 3+ years ago (Aug
| 2020) in a few days and was up and running. We used this at my
| previous company for 3 years, until I decided to transform it
| into a micro SaaS.
|
| The SaaS took 270 hours so far (so if I had done this in a
| typical 9-5 schedule, that would've taken me ~6-7 weeks).
| Sounds like too long, and it is, but considering I knew nothing
| about BE, FE, db, infrastructure, etc., and that I built it
| from scratch, completely ditching the previous version I had,
| it was quite a fun journey!
|
| AMA :) happy to answer any other question
| driverdan wrote:
| For anyone who wants to self host something to do this there's
| https://github.com/rogerluan/app-store-connect-notifier
| rogerluan wrote:
| Yup, that repo is mine! haha
|
| The cool thing is that I don't intend to take it down now that
| I built a SaaS around it. I'll keep both open source and SaaS
| versions of it live, and try to upsell the service to those who
| don't feel like self-hosting it. Plus, the SaaS version comes
| with features not available in the open source version (such as
| support to Android) :)
|
| Thanks for spotting and sharing this!
| driverdan wrote:
| That's great! We may actually use your hosted service since
| we haven't had the resources available to setup the self
| hosted version.
|
| Edit: Some quick feedback. Your pricing uses the word
| "workflow" but what that means isn't described anywhere on
| the site or FAQ. I assume it's used once you create an
| account but it's not clear what it means before signup.
| rogerluan wrote:
| Ooh, that's super valuable feedback, thank you so much!
|
| I'll fix that right away.
|
| PS: Lemme know if you need any guidance setting things up
| or have any further questions! There's the official support
| email but also white-glove treatment at t.me/rogerluan ;)
| rogerluan wrote:
| So, "what are workflows?"
|
| You'll notice that the subscription is based on
| workflows. A workflow is a connection between a source
| (e.g., your iOS app) and a destination (e.g., a Slack
| channel). You can set up as many workflows as you'd like,
| which is a great way to separate different types of
| notifications. For instance, #ios-deploys-prod receives
| updates about your production app, #ios-deploys-staging
| receives updates about your staging builds, and #android-
| deploys-beta receives updates about the Beta track of
| your Android builds. Each of these is a separate
| workflow.
|
| Now you can find all this in the FAQ:
| https://statused.com/faq#what-are-workflows
|
| Great spotting, thanks once again!
| mikhael28 wrote:
| Congratulations on building something! The muscle memory you have
| built will serve you well.
| rogerluan wrote:
| Thank you! I'm really excited for this!! Gonna continue
| building things that solve pain points I have in my daily
| routine, which might be useful to others too lol
| amelius wrote:
| My WebApps are never rejected ...
|
| They just run in a sandbox.
| rogerluan wrote:
| Oh this tool is not for web apps though, just mobile apps
| distributed to Google Play Store and App Store :)
| qainsights wrote:
| But why?
| rogerluan wrote:
| Statused is crafted for app developers, project managers, and
| QA teams who crave efficiency and a central point of
| communication for their app's release cycle. The larger the
| team looking to streamline its process, the better.
|
| Using the words of one of the customers I have: "it shifts the
| paradigm from us needing to pull information to getting it
| pushed to us! Really helpful!"
|
| It frees up time of mobile developers' and democratizes the
| access to the information across different departments :)
|
| Lemme know if there are other questions I can help answering!
| Happy to explain anything in further details
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Is this for Slack apps? Or Apps in general for example iOS apps,
| android apps.
|
| If slack app are you talking about workspace approval?
| rogerluan wrote:
| It's for Android/iOS apps, thus, app approval/rejection from
| e.g. Apple, but also applies to other app statuses too :)
|
| Key features:
|
| - Real-time Slack notifications for iOS and Android app review
| statuses. - Instant alerts for TestFlight releases for your
| internal team and external testers. - Updates on app processing
| changes, all in one place. - there's more, but those are the
| main features
|
| Happy to answer any other questions you might have! I wonder if
| the landing page isn't clear enough; is there anything you'd
| improve on it?
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(page generated 2023-11-09 23:01 UTC)