Sound Studio 4.0.4 update rejected and resubmitted

Yesterday I got an email from Apple’s App Review team that my update to Sound Studio version 4.0.4 was rejected because the app exited with status 173. This is what it should do when it can’t find a valid MAS Receipt (Mac App Store Receipt).

What puzzled me was that the exact same code passed App Store review when I submitted version 4.0.0, and when I tested it on my computer, it worked. So after posting on the Apple dev forums and a couple iChat sessions, I went looking through the documentation to see what I might be doing wrong with receipt validation.

Turns out that I had based my code on the documentation that was available in November, when I submitted the first version, and the docs have since been modified. The one change that I think was the cause of the rejection was that the filename for the MAS Receipt file was “Receipt” with a capital letter in the original documentation, but is now “receipt” in all lowercase in the current documentation. (Specifically, with the path “Contents/_MASReceipt/receipt” in the app bundle.)

This would only be a problem if you ran your app on a case-sensitive filesystem. UNIX systems typically use case-sensitive filesystems, but most Mac OS X installations are on case-insensitive filesystems, so that “Receipt” and “receipt” would be considered the same.

So I reformatted one of the partitions on my Mac mini to a case-sensitive filesystem, installed Snow Leopard, and tested the MAS version. No problems, so I resubmitted the app binary this morning.

I probably would not have though of this if I hadn’t used the Apple dev forums and posted something as well as searching for _MASReceipt issues. So make sure you test your app on a case-sensitive volume.