Adventures in App Store Release Dates- How to Not Accidentally Lose Your Only Revenue Source!

Revenue is continuing to pick up day by day across all our main markets.

We had a bit of a rough spot a few days after release, in what we’re calling a “clerical error”. (awkward cough)

Basically, the way that the App Store works, Apple decides who goes on the What’s New list based on the date you upload your app. Makes sense, right? You put it on the App Store, that’s the day that they show it being released. Simple.

However, there’s also the little detail of a 1-2 week waiting period trying to get approved… details! So, in order to show up on the What’s New list, you need to constantly update your release date to the next day. If it’s the 3rd, you have to go into the iTunes control panel and change your release date to the 4th. On the 4th, to the 5th, and the 5th to the 6th. So on and so forth, etc, etc.

Annoying, yet straightforward- but that’s what makes the App Store so great. There’s a shitload of money to be made and a lot of ways to stub your toes by doing something dumb. By navigating the toe stubbing possibilities more adeptly than the next guy, however you can generally trounce him in the sales charts and kill off your competition. It’s a game of micro-maneuvering, sly description edits, and search optimization.

Good times, basically.

So, going back to release date updates- I went to update our second application, Kindling, so it would show up on the right day. Straightforward.

Except, an hour later, Free Books disappeared from the Australian App Store! And, a half hour after that, it wasn’t showing up on US App Store. Or Canadian. Or British. At this point I was starting to panic a bit- clearly Apple had removed us just as sales were picking up! Cue frantic call to the Developer Support folks, who explained to me in a robotic yet endearingly Irish tones that the application had had the release date changed on our end.

Oops.

After fixing Free Books’ release date we slowly went back up on all the App Stores, but we had about a six hour sales outage smack dab in the middle of the Australian afternoon and the British morning. Long story short- our momentum was wrecked.

Thankfully, we’re back on track now, as the wicked chart above shows, mostly thank to some small edits and tweaks to our positioning.

As the newly livered one would say, BOOM!