Being the Product Owner of the ElfKit Festive Fitness Advent Calendar App

This week has seen us at McKenna Consultants successfully deploy the ElfKit Festive Fitness Advent Calendar App iOS8 iPhone and iPad app to the AppStore.

ElfKit is available on iOS8 from iPhones 4, 5, 6 and 6+ to iPads

This was especially exciting for me as I had the pleasure of being the Product Owner on this project! The app is based on a traditional advent calendar, where each day from 1st December you open a door. Behind each door there is a fun tip to help try and keep you fit and healthy over the Christmas period, hopefully instead of gorging on mince pies like myself and the rest of the team at McKenna Consultants!

We have also added some HealthKit integration and some little gimmicks to make it fun. You can read into more detail about the app on our website.

This app provided me with some unique Product Owner challenges. As a lot of app developers out there will know, Apple can sometimes have a tough approval process. A lot of this comes down to the person at Apple HQ who picks up your app to review.

When we submitted the app, within 13 minutes of receiving the "Your app is in review" email, the app was rejected! Imagine my horror! After a conversation with the reviewer, it turns out that they thought that the app was broken as when they tried to open a door they saw the "Too Soon" image. Now, we had anticipated this, so in the submission, we provided lengthy instructions on how to test the app (by dodging the dates).

Apparently though, the reviewer was adamant that this wasn't enough, and we had to provide a video to support the submission. We duly obliged, with my very own Yorkshire accent narrating the events on screen.

I thought that this would please the reviewer and the app would be accepted, but no! We were instructed to now re-submit the app and join the back of the queue!

As the app is based on a traditional advent calendar, it was imperative that it was live by 1st December, so I have been a nervous wreck for the past 8 days waiting for an answer!

To our delight (and my relief) the app was approved after being in review for a few hours!

You can view the app in iTunes here.

And......... Breathe!

Just another thing that us Product Owners have to deal with!