iTunes Connect Availability Date vs. Version Release Revisited
It’s been a while since my first post on the subject. Currently, many things changed (even the design) & fixed on iTunes Connect. We still have “Availability Date” but the “Release Date” is now replaced with “Version Release”. I wanted to share how those two options working together to achieve different results.
First, let’s take a look at the options.
Availability Date
That option is still working as before. By default, it’s set to the date of your app record creation. If the current date is greater than this date, then your app will be available on the App Store considering your version is “released” and approved, standing in “Ready for Sale” state. If not, it won’t be available on the store. Btw, you may also use that option to remove the app from sale, if you ever need to do that simply change the date in sometime in future as an alternative to removing the app from regions to do that.
Version Release
This option is mostly used for app updates but currently you can also use that for the new apps. For app updates, you can have an app released & available on the store but might want to withhold the release of an update until a certain event. In that case, that’s the option you’ll want to use.
Current state based on our recent experience.
- “New Releases” list problem seems to be fixed. As long as the app is released & available, and that’s happening for the first time (for the region) your app will be featured in the new releases list of that region.
- If you have a fixed release date in the future just set the availability date to match it and make sure the app will be automatically released after review.
- If you want to release manually, just make sure the availability date is set to a date in the past and manually release the app when it’s time.
- Version release might take few hours to make it to the store while availability date works faster. So, if you want to release an app at 00:00 local time of each region, use the availability date. If you release it manually at 00:00 at some local time, it’ll will be available on the store at different times for each region after the app store process complete (which might take some time as noted above).
If you have any suggestions/corrections, please share in comments so I can update the article as needed.