It is my goal to release my app on Wed 9/30. It's currently approved by apple and in the status of Pending Developer Release. How long does it take to be published to the app store after I hit the release button in iTunes Connect? In other words, should I hit release on Tue if I want it released on Wed, or just wait till Wed morning?
FWIW, the iTunes connect help documentation has this to say about it. "Your app version will then be live on the store pending the customary processing times." Problem is, I have no idea what a customary processing time is...
I think it's a couple of hours. This StackOverflow post seems to agree: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10324981/itunes-connect-release-this-version-delay There is no guarantee.
This is just going on the time frame for when we hit the "Publish" button for Skeletomb... When you hit the publish the binary will go through processing for the App Store, which took about an hour. After which it goes into the "Ready for Sale" state. That means it's up on the App Store but it takes time for it to get into the store cache and be searchable. This took 4 hours for Skeletomb to be viewable on the App Store. Our goal was to release at 9am PST, but it didn't end up going live until 11am PST on the 25th. Everyone's experience can be slightly different and I obviously can't make any guarantees that you'll have a similar time frame. Hope this was helpful in some way.
It's a few hours from my experience, but, if you want to release on a specific date for each time-zone (i.e. 12:00 AM per time zone), you would set the availability to the date you want, and not use the 'manual release' option. I.e. click the 'release this version' button right now, but set your availability date to 9/30 beforehand. The 'processing' would be done now, but it will not appear/be available until your availability date. On the other hand if you want it to release at the same absolute moment on Wednsday for the whole world, then use the 'release' button then and wait the few hours for processing (Though i've read some people say it can take up to 24 hours in some cases), and it's not exactly the same minute for each country. Most of the common Thursday releases use the first option, whatever suits you.
A little clarification: After the app is "ready for sale", anyone with the direct link (can be found on iTunesConnect) can install it. Always handy if you're indie and want to get that last "Launch Test After The App Store Mangles My Code (LTATASMMC)" test in.
