Zoom SDK App review - Grievances

Oogway
Mon, 02 Oct 2023 12:05:05 +0000
App Submission

This is about the Zoom SDK app review process and because of lack of proper grievance redressal systems, I am posting here.

We have been trying, without any success, to publish our SDK app for the last 32 days and the following has been the response timeline from the Zoom App Review team:

28 August 2023 - App submitted for review after checking the checklist, providing all the necessary documentation, and filling out the relevant fields with correct details. Since the process only outlined how to test the Web SDK we provided all the relevant steps in the “Release notes for the app reviewer”

30 August 2023 - Response from Zoom - Asked for more details about the SDKs being used in the Android and iOS apps using a Google Form (this was never mentioned in the review process earlier otherwise we would have provided all of the information upfront and saved a review cycle

2 September 2023 - The SDK marketplace app resubmitted for review after filling the mobile SDK google form and providing the Android App APK link (which was deemed sufficient as per the Google Form since the app is available on both iOS and Android).

5 September 2023 - Response from Zoom - Review process unable to proceed because deauthorization failed. This was a bug on Zoom’s end because the deauthorization webhook event being sent by Zoom was still using the Zoom Verification Token for authorization as opposed to the Zoom Secret Token which was being used by all the other webhooks (we will find out about this bug later)

6 September 2023 - App resubmitted for review, after deauthorizing the app from the reviewer’s account (we were unclear on how deauthorization had failed) and a new Android APK

8 September 2023 - Response from Zoom - Some valid issues pointed out in the SDK implementation in Android, Web and iOS. We never realized that the iOS app will also be tested because it was explicitly mentioned in the mobile SDK review Google Form that iOS app link has to be provided ONLY IF our app was available ONLY on iOS. The reviewer downloaded the app from App Store and began testing it, which had the older version of Zoom SDK.

8 September 2023 - Response submitted to Zoom with the iOS Testflight public link of the app and the relevant changes.

12 September 2023 - Response from Zoom - New issues, valid, mentioned in the iOS SDK implementation. The fact that iOS app will also be reviewed, could have been outlined at the outset and saved 3 unnecessary back and forth cycles with the Zoom review team.

14 September 2023 - Resubmitted the review application with all the relevant changes made. Pointed out a bug in the iOS SDK that made it impossible to adhere to SDK implementation guidelines but we implemented however the documentation suggested we should proceed.

18 September 2023 - Response from Zoom - The review process could not proceed because the review was unable to delink their Zoom account from our application. This was when we realized the bug with the deauthorization process - this was entirely Zoom’s fault.

19 September 2023 - Resubmitted the review application after provisioning for Zoom’s bug at our backend servers and delinking the reviewer’s account from our application.

22 September 2023 - Response from Zoom - The reviewer could not proceed because the reviewing step as outlined in the release notes PDF that we provided was on page 2 of the file. They thought the step was missing.

22 September 2023 - Resubmitted the application while pointing out that the steps are available on Page 2 of the release notes.

It has been 11 days and we haven’t heard from the review team yet and without a provisional public Publishable URL (unavailable for SDK apps, and never ever mentioned in the documentaion), all our users are now struggling without Zoom integration.

It has been more than 33 days now and there is no visibility into how much longer it will take. This is absolutely unprofessional and mismanaged.

Where are developers like us supposed to go? We have bet big on Zoom and we are regretting that bet.

2 posts - 2 participants