Last night we have released a free app in the Mac AppStore. The app didn't yet show up when searching for (parts of) the title, however, we could find it by searching for one of our existing Mac Apps and clicking through to our 'Developer Page'.
When 'buying' the app (it's actually free), the icon pops up in LaunchPad and the progress bar for downloading & installing shows. Under Snow Leopard, the icon pops into the Dock and the progress bar for downloading & installing shows.
However, in both cases, as soon as the progress bar is filled, the app directly disappears from the LaunchPad / Dock and can no longer be started.
I've checked my Applications folder, but the app is nowhere to be found. I also checked this on other systems (under user accounts that never develop in XCode), those showed the exact same problem. I've also tried downloading a few other free apps from the Mac AppStore on my own system, these downloaded and installed successfully and don't disappear.
There seems to be a problem with our app that causes this issue, but I have no idea what it could possibly be. I didn't find anyone else suffering from this problem.
First and foremost, I would love to know what causes this so we can fix it.
Secondly, I am wondering how this app ever came through Apple's review process having this issue.
Any ideas?? Thanks in advance!
An Apple Dev on the Apple Developer Forums answered this question:
Do you have a copy of that app elsewhere on the system? App Store will install it over an existing copy, whereever that copy happens to be.
A different user on my system had previously built a debug build of the app from XCode. Apparently, any downloaded versions of Mac Apps are written over those apps -- even if the old version is within the home folder of a different user on your system, any version you purchase/download from the Mac AppStore will overwrite thát version; effectively locking out the downloading user from the app that he may have just paid for.
Imho, that's a crappy way of handling 'updates'. But it's good to know our app is working fine.
Thanks for the help StilesCrisis!
Update: Apple has asked me to file a bug report for this issue, will do.