What nobody tells you about publishing an app to the App Store and Google Play

We built Cleenly's employee app in Expo, which removes a lot of the pain of code signing and local Xcode/Android Studio setup. What Expo doesn't solve, though, are the store review rules themselves.

Apple wants a short, specific justification for every permission (location, notifications, camera) right in the app's settings — a generic sentence like "we need location to improve the app" won't pass review. Write exactly what the permission is for (ours: "location is used to confirm arrival at the cleaning address"), and have a demo account with real data ready, so the reviewer sees the app in action instead of an empty screen after login.

Google Play surprised us more: a new developer account first has to run the app through closed testing with a minimum number of testers who have to keep it installed and active for a set period before Google even lets you release to production. Finding fifteen people who'll install the app and remember not to uninstall it turns out to be surprisingly hard when you don't already have a user base.

We used primetestlab.com for this — a paid service that provides the required number of testers who install the app and satisfy Google's conditions. It cost a few tens of dollars and saved weeks of waiting for enough real people to install it.