Mobile Application Lifecycle Management

You can manage the lifecycle of mobile applications you create in WSO2 App Manager as described below.

Web Application Lifecycle Management

Introduction to app lifecycle management

The application (app) approval process involves all the states in an application life cycle from creation to retirement. Your actions are restricted based on the permissions that are assigned to you. The following topics illustrate the application approval process.

App lifecycle management action definitions

You can carry out the following actions in the application approval process.

Action	Definition
Submit	Creator submits newly created apps to be reviewed.
Approve	The reviewer approves apps that pass the review process.
Reject	The reviewer rejects mobile apps that fail the review process.
Publish	The publisher publishes approved apps. All published apps are visible in the App Store.
Unpublish	The publisher un-publishes apps if required. Unpublished apps are temporarily removed from the App Store, but are supported by App Manager. Furthermore, you can re-publish these apps to the Store whenever needed.
Depreciate	The publisher deprecates mobile apps. All deprecated apps are automatically removed from the Store, to stop all new installations. However, these mobile apps are supported by App Manager.
Retire	The publisher retires apps. Retired apps are not supported by App Manager in the future. In such instances, all retired apps are automatically removed from the Store, to stop all new installations.

App lifecycle management based on user roles

The transitions in the app approval process, together with the permissions needed at each state are listed as follows:

Transition Process	Allowed Roles	Allowed Actions
Creating a new app	Administrator Internal/Publisher	Publish
Submitting newly created apps	Administrator Internal/Publisher	Submit
Reviewing submitted apps	Administrator Internal/Review	Approve/ Reject
Publishing approved apps	Administrator Internal/Publisher	Publish
Re-submitting rejected apps	Administrator Internal/Publisher	Submit
Unpublishing published apps	Administrator Internal/Publisher	Unpublish
Re-publishing unpublished apps	Administrator Internal/Publisher	Publish
Deprecating unpublished apps	Administrator Internal/Publisher	Deprecate
Deprecating published apps	Administrator Internal/Publisher	Deprecate
Retiring deprecated apps	Administrator Internal/Publisher	Retire

App lifecycle management states

After adding the application to the publisher, you need to promote its lifecycle state to published state, to publish it as follows.

Once an application is added to App Manager, it is added to the registry as an asset, and a lifecycle is attached to the application. The lifecycle state for a newly created application is 'Created'. You can change the state to 'In-Review', which will automatically initialize a work flow event. Once an admin user approves the work flow event, then lifecycle state moves to the 'Published' state and will appear in the Store for you to consume. This behavior can be extended according to the user requirement with the provided extension points.

Once an application reaches the 'Published' state, an API resource will be created under <PRODUCT_HOME>/repository/deployment/server/synapse-configs/default/api/ directory. Name of the file will be {app created user}–{app name}_v{version}.xml. This is the REST endpoint, which will be invoked once the gateway URL is accessed.