Dúisigh is on Google Play (the App Store said not yet)
Porting Dúisigh to Android, getting it through Play review, and the iPad bug that got the iPhone version rejected.
Dúisigh is for adults waking up the Irish they learned at school. It’s speaking first, in Standard Irish, with an owl called Koko cheering you on. This week it went live on Google Play, in every country.
One course, two apps
The Android app is a native Kotlin and Jetpack Compose port of the iPhone app, not a wrapper. What it shares is the content: the course, the conversation scenes and over 700 audio clips live in one folder that both apps bundle. The daily challenge and the phrase of the day are worked out the same way on both, so an iPhone and an Android phone show the same thing on the same day.
Android also got something iPhone doesn’t have yet: Sign in with Google, so your progress follows you to a new phone. The server keeps one small document per account and merges changes with the same rules the iPhone app uses for iCloud.
Getting through Play review
Most of the work wasn’t code. It was the privacy policy, the data safety form, a content rating, an account-deletion page, store screenshots, and a way for the reviewer to try the paid features. Play also wanted the latest target API and Billing library before it would let me create subscriptions at all.
The first release passed. A follow-up build is smaller, because release builds now shrink and obfuscate the code.
Meanwhile, on the App Store
The iPhone version was rejected. The reviewer tested it on an iPad, and the subscription plans didn’t load.
Dúisigh is an iPhone app, but iPads run it in an iPhone-sized window, and App Review uses them. The plans now retry a few times, the paywall asks again every time it opens, and if it still can’t reach the store it says “Loading plans…” with a Try again button. Android got the same fix. It’s back in the queue.
Lesson learned: test on an iPad simulator before every submission, even for an iPhone-only app.