As of 8:30 this morning, Hybrid AutoPress is in Apple’s hands: version 1.0 for iPhone, iPad and Mac, along with the two AutoPress Pro subscriptions. The app uploads Markdown files to WordPress in batches, complete with images, categories and SEO fields. It is the second half of my editor Hybrid: the text is written there, and AutoPress gets it onto the website.
Now comes the waiting. That leaves time to tell you how hectic the day before was.
Five builds in one day
On a normal day, one test build is cause for celebration. Yesterday there were five. Each one fixed a problem and promptly showed me the next.
Photos came first. On iPhone and iPad, AutoPress now asks at first launch whether it may use the photo library. Say no and you lose nothing. You can still pick photos one at a time.
Then a picture went missing in a test document, and I immediately blamed the new permission. Wrong guess. Hybrid had stored the picture in its own app storage, and no other app can reach in there, whatever you allow it. AutoPress now says so plainly, also looks for the picture next to the document, and lets you replace it with a tap if all else fails.
Enter the goat
The star of the day was a white goat from the Oberwald in Karlsruhe. Its photo was meant to be a featured image and arrived in WordPress as a PNG weighing a hefty 4 MB. The setting said JPEG.
The culprit was a quirk of the system. When it turns an iPhone photo upright, it tacks on a transparency channel with nothing transparent in it. So the app took the goat for see-through and kept it as a PNG, just to be safe. Now it looks at the pixels themselves.
In the next build the goat arrived as a well-behaved JPEG, but at 748 KB. Still too much, since 100 to 200 KB counts as healthy for the web. Measuring brought the real surprise: Apple’s JPEG means something entirely different by “quality 80” than the rest of the world does. Its files came out two to four times the size of WebP at a similar setting, and at normal size you could barely tell level 80 from level 35.
So AutoPress now works with a budget. If a picture is too heavy, the quality steps down, and very detailed photos shrink to 1200 pixels if they must. My test photos ended up between 78 and 178 KB. The fifth build drew the obvious conclusion: WebP is now the default. And the picture above? I simply dragged it from Apple’s photo library into Hybrid, and AutoPress uploaded it as WebP along with the rest. Cool.
The night of small things
The evening belonged to paperwork. Because the screenshots still said “JPEG”, every one of them had to be redone: 225 pictures for Mac, iPad and iPhone in nine languages. Thankfully, scripts do that.
Going through the details in App Store Connect then turned up a few things. The keywords contained the names of other people’s products, which Apple does not like at all. Category, age rating and copyright were missing. And the price schedule existed but had no price in it. Even “free” wants to be entered explicitly.
Two clicks from the finish line
Late at night everything was ready, and Apple still said no. The privacy declaration was missing. The answer is simple: AutoPress collects no data.
This morning I caught up, and learned that at Apple “saved” does not mean “published”. Only a blue button at the top right makes the answer count. After that, the subscriptions still had to be attached to the version by hand, because Apple reviews an app’s first subscriptions only together with the app itself.
Shortly afterwards the submission went through. As soon as Apple gives the green light, Hybrid AutoPress will appear on the App Store automatically. Until then, everything worth knowing is at hybrid-autopress.com.