Archive for category App Store

Today we celebrate the launch of Traveling Classics. We are starting off with a lineup of 8 books. You can check-out the line-up at our Products page.

One interesting discovery I made this morning has to do with the way the App Store handles Release Date. It was our desire to have all 8 books show up in the Books section of the App Store on the same day but as the Apple review process takes an indeterminate amount of time we figured we had to adjust the Availability Date to make this happen. We set the Availability Date for each of the apps to today (Feb 12) and then waited for them each to be approved. Two of them were approved on Feb 6th, and the rest on Feb 9th.

Well, today is launch day and so I fire up iTunes expecting to see all 8 apps on the front page of ‘New Releases’ in the Books section. But no, they are missing. First I wondered if they just hadn’t been rolled out to their servers (It was around 5am EST). But then I starting clicking through the other pages and I found them. The two apps approved on Feb 6th show up on the 6th, and the other 6 show up on the 9th. It appears that the Availability Date setting only controls when they show up in the store, but has no impact on the Release Date shown in iTunes.

This behavior is probably to prevent people from constantly tweaking their dates to have there app show up on the front page, but it is a little annoying that we missed the good publicity of being on the front page. Apple’s store, Apple’s Rules.

I guess the lesson learned for other developers out there is that you should just set the Availability Date to the day you get approved and just go with that.