We have an app, under our company IOS account which is a white label software our company started with. We own the app store, they own the back end.
We have spent the last 12 months developing our own IP, we are now ready to push it to market. Long story short its a rideshare platform, we do about 1500 rides a day and have roughly 300 drivers active on the system.
The driver app is fine, we can created this IOS account separately to host that, but we obviously need to push the update of our client app. I realize without our current developer knowing or playing ball we cant "force the update" and thats a hurdle we are okay with.
HOWEVER the 5-10 potential days that we have to submit the final build as an update scares the crap out of me, if our developer takes the news poorly they could crash the back end and 300 drivers are out of work and thousands of clients are without rides to work, doctors, school etc (we operate in towns and cities with no other options)
If we set our old developer permissions to only see "old app", we then upload "new app" can we somehow seek approvals, do configurations and then still use the new app as an update over the old app rather than as new software?
This would simply help eliminate 90% of the time where the old developer could get upset and disrupt or crash the business.
Right now the plan is to lock out the old developer, send them an honest, polite email explaining our choice, as well as a bit of a financial bribe (which to be frank we cant afford so it hurts) but lets say they have sometimes been stubborn and not fun to work with, so I am not confident.
Im hoping that is not our only option to go through this one of situation.
Key notes:
- New developer says they need 3-5 days after submitted to the app store for configuration and testing (so far testing is on their apple account/testflgiht)
- Typically beyond that apple could be another 2-7 days for approval and update
- Even at this point we have no way to force the update, because we dont have access to the previous back end
- 300 peoples jobs, 1500 peoples daily transportation depend on us not being down for an extended period of time, which to be blunt our current developer may not care about when considering making the transition easy.