Hello dev world and fitbit devs. This is a little moan about the review process and a couple of questions.
Maybe its because i'm a manger and communication, processes are important to me but there seems to be an inconsistency when it comes to getting clock faces approved, this would have me believe that when they are being reviewed they are either being tested differently by different individuals or they are interpreting the guidelines differently (il get onto that in a minute), its a little frustrating.
Last month I had a clock face refused, the reason
"Due to the fact that your clock face has irrelevant, misleading or excessive tags, we regretfully inform you that we have declined your submission"
That's it, no explanation whatsoever into what those tags were, I have checked over twice and there is nothing misleading about the description so I have resubmitted.
Today they went one better,
"Due to the fact that your AD lancer clock face has irrelevant, misleading or excessive tags (Stats Heavy), we regretfully inform you that we have declined your submission"
That's right, the description for the clock face clearly indicates you can click to cycle through your stats, the only stat missing is elevation gain. That means you can view, Steps, Calories, Minutes, Distance (both M/KM) and your heart rate, this on many other watch faces has been sufficient for 'stats heavy' . I then get a link included about the guidelines, in which it does not explain what constitutes stats heavy or misleading, so this is open to interpretation by the reviewer, again leading to inconsistency (on that page).
This would leave me to a couple of conclusions, the description has not been read, therefore the reviewer is not aware that you can cycle stats or different reviewers are interpenetrating the guidelines differently, if so this needs to be clarified.
I am only bringing this up due to the timescale now involved, I go to great lengths to make sure anything i submit works properly and adheres to the rules, i spend two weeks testing each face in order to make sure they work and they won't need updates to resolve issues later down the line. This also adds an extra pressure to the reviewers who are just getting developers resubmitting clock faces that have been refused that then get approved by a different reviewer (this has happened on multiple occasions) which then increases the reviewers work load, resulting in longer review times.
Please reassure me i'm not going mad, the ability to view all but one stat is surely classed as 'stats heavy'.
I will now have to wait 7 days for fitbit to review again and for them to probably inform me that I need to add the stats heavy tag again as it is now misleading that I have removed it.
One last question: Do those clock faces that have been refused go into a separate queue when they are resubmitted or are they all just piled in together? This probably needs cleaning up, especially if its just an alteration to the text, it seems a bit cumbersome to go through the clock face test again, surely these refusals should be move to a separate queue for the developer to make the alteration to the text and then can be approved more efficiency once altered (i'm thinking work flows here).
I imagine this stems from Fitbit not anticipating the work load that would be generated from clock face reviews so the processes were not laid out in full at the start. It does seem a few minor alterations would help speed up the process and alleviate the work load, but hey thats not job, just a suggestion.
Sorry for the moan but I try to spread out my submissions for the benefit of the reviewers but these refusals just end up making it look like i'm submitting all at once.
Suggestion: in the 'App Manager' place a description next to the tags of what is expected (Stats Heavy, Winter etc)
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