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Release Dates

When submitting to the App Store for approval, you’ll commonly hear of people setting a release date well in the future, then rolling it back once approved.  We made the over-optimistic mistake of setting our release date to shortly after the day I submitted, relying on my favorite submission stats site that said we’d be good to go in something like 2.5 days.  Lo and behold, it took nearly 20 days get approved.  Doh!

Once approved, our application appeared on the 23rd page of the Arcade Games sub-category due to a release date of July 14th, which I felt was a little unfair.  I checked the iTunes Connect site on Tuesday and it had our release day grayed out (which meant no updates).  However, yesterday during the workshop I noticed that it was no longer grayed out, so this morning I updated both versions to tomorrow.  I was expecting everything to update overnight as it has so far and get us to the top of the listings.

Matt and I were slightly concerned about whether Apple would have a problem with this later-date change, and while I felt there would be no issues Matt was concerned of running afoul of Apple.  Lo and behold, iLostMyMarbles totally disappeared from the App Store this evening for a few hours!  This obviously put us into crisis mode, but we decided to see if everything would fix itself in the morning.

Luckily it re-appeared this evening as well, and with a new release date of the 3rd (which was our actual approval date).  Apple was apparently nice enough to set ours to the 3rd without even scolding us, but I can see how changing release dates like we did could be abused to keep Apps at the top of the “New & Noteworthy” listings.  I’m not sure they’ll be so understanding in the future!

The moral of the story is that you should set release dates well in the future, then reset them to your actual approval date once approved.  Live and learn!