Hey guys, So i read some blog posts about this F-ing Release Date thing for your App, and what date will matter for your app to appear in the 'New' section of AppStore. Today i got some good news, my game has finally been approved. WOHOO! When my game was approved my Release Date was set to Dec 30, 2009. I am afraid to change this until i know exactly how this *S* works. If i change the Date from Dec 30 2009 to Dec 16 2009 will my app be under New apps tomorrow or not? i know my app will be available, but will it be shown under new games? This is an important question for my marketing i wanna do and i am sooo pissed that after paying $100, waiting for over 3 weeks and give 30% of my money to Apple i can't get this answered. I have been dealing with AppStore for some of my smaller apps and always knew that this AppStore is many times just a big mess when it comes to the developing app part. But now it's time for me to release my 'BIG THING' and i wanna make it right. I hope someone out there has answers for this and they will be highly appreciated! Ps. sorry for being grumpy, but this creates unnecessary stress =) Thanks, /M
It still seems unclear… some developers are saying it now works to set your release date as whatever date and it will be listed in new releases even if it's set to release two months from now, others give different experiences. I noticed that Gameloft have actually set a 'release date' for NOVA, which is almost unprecedented for a developer or publisher to do because of the aforementioned problems. So if Gameloft are trusting that the release date quirks are now fixed, it seems like the waters might be safe for you to try out. It's still a slight gamble there however. Whatever you do, it would be hugely helpful to us if you post back the results of what happens.
Thanks for the reply. I will let you know how everything will turn out in the end. Still waiting for 1 of my in-app features to be approved.
For our latest app, it was approved on 11/15 but we set the release for 11/25 and when it came out on 11/25 it was in the new release section no problem. So long as you don't mess with the date and set it far enough ahead of when apple approves it (your best guess I suppose) you shouldn't have a problem. Then again maybe Apple will do another stealth policy change. Lately I've found the new release section to be almost worthless with all the spam apps coming out. Halp! was buried on page three by noon of that day in a sea of bikini apps
I was still doing the change the release day each day dance when my app launched - it did get in the new releases, but seemingly quite late in the day and it was never on page 1. For our next game I'm tempted to either completely leave it, or actually set a date somewhat in the future.
The Release Date rubbish tripped us up on our first Game, being new we hadn't heard much about the issues. We thought that the day it gets accepted would be the release date, but when the game was released the date was actually the day we submitted the game. We managed with the 'Pro' version of the game to change it just after it was accepted and that worked, it showed up as the day that we set it to. In future we are going to set release dates far ahead and then set them back to the next day when accepted.
