Part 13: Your website · Build Your Card App

Put a simple, honest website on your domain, publish the web version of your app from the same code as the phones, get an email address on your domain, make your emails land in inboxes, and write the privacy policy, terms, support page and help center the stores require.

Your app needs a website before it can be in the stores. Not a big one: a page that says what the app does, a privacy policy, terms, a support page with a way to reach you, and a help center. Apple and Google ask for the addresses of those pages when you submit, and their reviewers open them. The website also serves two small hidden files that let your app and your domain trust each other, and it hosts the web app: your app in a browser, built from the same code as the phones.

The website lives in a folder inside your project, so it is backed up with everything else and published only from the newest version. In one real build a website made with another tool lived outside the project, nobody could fix it from the project, and a private file in its folder was public for weeks. Everything here stays in the project.

Two steps are about email. One gives you an address on your domain, like support@, that forwards to the inbox you already have. The other makes sure the emails your app sends, sign-in codes first, arrive instead of landing in spam, with the three DNS records that mailbox providers check, a bounce address, and the registration Apple needs for people who hid their email. The last two steps are the legal pages and the help pages. The guide is not legal advice, and it says where a professional has to look before launch. Plan a day for the website and the web app, an hour for email, and a few hours for the pages, plus waits for DNS changes and for a professional's reply.