Changing the App Store Availability Date For Fun & Profit
In case you haven’t heard, Gratuitous 1.2 was approved and is now available in the App Store. Go grab it!
Right now, if you take a look at the Finance category of the App Store, you’ll see Gratuitous front and center. If all goes well, we should remain on the Finance category home page for the next few days. Perhaps due to this increased visibility, we had a significant increase in sales during our first day on the home page. We understand that correlation is not causation, but we’re still hopeful this significant uptick in sales continues.
8/13/2009 update: Uptick continues! Day 2 sales were 18% higher than day 1.
How’d we pull this one off?
It’s a simple trick involving manipulation of your application’s availability date in iTunes Connect. When set to the current date, your app will appear in your respective category sorted to the front of the list as by default, iTunes displays apps by release date.
The availability date is intended for developers who want a deterministic release date for their application in order to coordinate press and advertising around a known date. This is common in the video game, music, and film industries where companies coordinate a media blitz around a specific date. However, with the uncertainty of the App Store review process, developers do not know when their app will be approved. Thus, companies can use the availability date to set a future date (after their app has been approved) so they can then coordinate press around this known release date.
However, most iPhone developers don’t coordinate media around applications, instead allowing the application to be made available immediately after it is approved by Apple. Here’s how to set the availability date to maximize the exposure of your app each time you release an update. These steps must be taken on the day your app is approved by Apple.
- iTunes Connect > Manage Your Applications
- Click Edit Information under your respective app
- Click the Pricing tab
- Set the Availability Date field to today’s date. If this is set to a future date, your app will be pulled from the App Store and won’t be made available until this date.
- Click Save Changes
This change will take a few minutes to propagate throughout the various App Store servers, after which your app will be shown on front page of its respective category. Depending on the frequency of app releases in your category, your app could be on the front page for anywhere from less than a day to several days. Being in the relatively quiet Finance category, Gratuitous should remain on the front page for around 5 days.
You might ask yourself why you shouldn’t just constantly adjust the availability date so that your app is permanently displayed on the category home page. Well, Apple has this scenario covered by using either the lesser of the date your app was approved or the availability date set in iTunes Connect. For example:
8/10/2009 – App or update approved by Apple
8/11/2009 – Availability date in iTunes Connect
In this case, Apple will use 8/10/2009 (the lesser date) for your application in the App Store. This is why you should set the availability date to the same date your app was approved. Additionally, setting the availability date past the approval date will simply cause Apple to withhold your app from the App Store until the availability date, after which your app will be listed with the earlier approval date.
Know of any other tips for fellow iPhone developers? Leave a comment below!
What’s the point in putting a bit.ly URL in a blog post, except that it hides the fact that it’s an App Store link?
Ölbaum
13 Aug 09 at 1:12 pm
The intention isn’t to hide the location of the URL. As an aside, bit.ly can be determined easily by simply appending a + to the end of the URL. For example, http://bit.ly/3vGA83+. Additionally, if you’re using Firefox you can install the bit.ly preview addon (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10297).
The reason why I used the bit.ly link here is because I want to see exactly how many people are clicking on the link to the iTunes page for Gratuitous. Unfortunately, Apple does not provide developers with any data on page views for our iTunes app pages. Therefore, we’re left to try and gauge how many people click on the link. When you post a link on a forum, twitter, etc, unless its wrapped with a tracking service (like bit.ly), you have no idea how many people viewed the link.
I touched upon this in a blog post last week which you can read here: http://blog.weareuproar.com/6-free-tools-we-couldnt-live-without/
Thanks for reading!
kevin
13 Aug 09 at 11:30 pm
We had a product on the store approved three weeks ago, but it just posted today. I wish I had known about this earlier. It’s a good thing this wasn’t our flagship app, but just an app to see if we could see how things worked. ( don’t get me wrong, it’s good app, we’re very upset about the placement it has right now). If this had been our major app, we really would have missed out on one of the few things Apple does to help promote apps… The newly added category. Now we’re buried four pages in. Very disappointing.
Thanks for letting us know what do next time.
Dean
21 Sep 09 at 4:20 pm
Thanks Kevin for this clarification on the availability date. Very helpful for new developers and veterans alike. We made a mistake last year that cost us days off the store, which will never happen again now!
Jiropole
12 Mar 10 at 10:54 am