Several lists in the App Store are sorted by release date: the more recent your application’s release date, the higher and more favorable its position in these lists. There are ways to adjust this date, though, as you might expect, there are rules in place to prevent developers from abusing this feature. Unfortunately, these guidelines are not documented and require a bit of investigative work to make out.

Much of the issue stems from the unclear relationship between your application’s availability date in iTunes Connect and its listed release date in the App Store. Your application’s release date is set to its availability date or the approval date of its latest update, whichever is earlier. This means your application’s release date can never be later than the approval date of its most recent update. Note that you can change the availability date as often as you wish to any date provided it hasn’t already passed; the release date, however, won’t budge beyond the latest approval date.

As a general rule, you’ll want to exercise caution when adjusting the availability date. Changing the date to a more recent one can actually remove your application from the App Store, albeit temporarily. Here’s an example:

ExampleApp currently has a release date of March 1. I submit an update which is approved today, March 12. In an effort to bump ExampleApp to the top of the lists, I change the availability date to tomorrow, March 13. What I fail to realize is that this removes ExampleApp from sale for the remainder of March 12.

Adding further confusion to the mix is figuring out what constitutes an update’s approval date. Is it the date the notification e-mail is received? The date the update is actually available at the App Store (generally a few hours later)? Or is it something else altogether? We deal with this issue by waiting until the evening after our approval e-mail is received to update our availability date.

For example, if we receive the e-mail on the evening of March 12, we’ll update the availability date to March 13 before we head to bed that night. By changing it to the 13th rather than the 12th, we risk briefly removing the application from sale if it’s approval date was marked as the 12th. On the other hand, we also give ourselves the opportunity to have the application listed with a more recent release date if it’s approval date was marked as the 13th. Unless your application is selling very well, the benefit of higher placement in the listings should outweigh the drawback of losing a couple hours of potential sales in the middle of the night.

As a final note, it’s unclear whether tinkering with the availability date can affect featured applications. We were fortunate enough to have Brain Thaw featured in the New and Noteworthy section of the App Store last month. During its four-week run, we opted to leave its availability date unchanged during updates to prevent it from being delisted and possibly disrupting its featured status.

After putting our heads to together on ways to get more exposure for our first iPhone app, Brain Thaw, we decided to release a free Lite version.   After all, the best way to reach more people through iTunes is to decrease your price, and until Apple allows developers to pay users for downloading their app, you can’t get any cheaper than free.  Besides, releasing a Lite version of iShoot worked wonders for developer Ethan Nicholas, so why not us?

Jump forward one month.  We’ve succussfully released Brain Thaw Lite, and we’ve learned a few lessons along the way.  Here’s a few tips to other developers that embark along the same path.

Tip #1: Apple is extremely restrictive on what you can do within a Lite application, so design your application accordingly.  Technically, you cannot upsell an application, meaning you cannot include crippled features and ask the user to unlock these features by upgrading.  After a little trial and error, this turned out to mean we could not show grayed out “Meduim” and “Hard” difficulty levels, but we could put a “Buy Brain Thaw” button on the home page of our app and a screen after completing each game listing all the benefits of the paid version.  Complying with these rules was not difficult, but I wished I was aware of them upfront.  Keep in mind that Apple has been a bit inconsistent in what it approves and what it rejects, so your mileage may vary.

Tip #2: Incorporate analytics.  I bet a lot of you would like to know if releasing a Lite version of our application has been a success.  My answer: I have no idea.  Since Apple does not release information about how users arrive at an iTunes app page, it’s impossible to know how many of our sales are coming from Lite users upgrading to the full version.  We’re planning on incorporating an iTunes analytics program into our next update so we can track conversions (Pinch Media and Mobclix to name a few) , and I would suggest that everyone contemplating a Lite version of their application do the same.

That’s all for now.  If anyone has experience with a good analytics package, I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments.

As someone who’s big into preparation, I had all sorts of questions as we worked on our first iPhone application, a nifty math puzzler called Brain Thaw. What did we have to do to become registered iPhone developers? How long could we expect that process to take? Once we had a finished application, how long would it be before it was available at the App Store? I had no shortage of questions.

So, as a service to iPhone initiates who share my curiosity/neuroses, I’ve chronicled how the process went for Brain Thaw from an administrative point of view. Your experience will almost certainly be different, though this should at least provide you with a clearer idea of what to expect as you roll out your first iPhone application.

• July 15, 2008 : Applied for the iPhone Developer Program (iPDP) as a business (LLC). We applied for the Standard Program.
• July 28, 2008 : Faxed our business registration certificate to Apple. This was in response to an e-mail an ADC representative sent us requesting a form of identity for our business. Eligible documents include the following (pasted from the e-mail):
  • Articles of incorporation
  • Business license
  • Certificate of formation
  • DBA “Doing Business As…”
  • Fictitious name statement
  • Registration of trademark
  • Charter documents
  • Partnership papers
  • Reseller or vendor license
• August 15, 2008 : Accepted to the iPDP. A bit of gentle prodding can be effective at this stage. After waiting weeks without a response from Apple on any of our e-mails, we decided to give them a call. According to the ADC representative, the only step remaining was for them to verify our business phone number: she called our business line, we answered, and within a few minutes we received our activation e-mail. A few clicks and a license agreement later, we were ready to go with an account at the iPDP Portal and iTunes Connect.
• December 10, 2008 : Submitted Paid Applications Contract at iTunes Connect. This is something we should have handled much sooner, not two days before submitting our application. In order to distribute a commercial application, you must sign a Paid Contract and provide your bank and tax information. Apple must review your information before the contract is activated, so don’t wait too long to take care of this. You can submit an application as soon as you’ve been accepted to the iPDP, and it can even be approved without an active contract, but it won’t actually be posted for sale until your contract has been activated. Free applications require no such approval process.
• December 12, 2008 : Submitted Brain Thaw to the App Store. It helps to prepare all of your application metadata beforehand (see the iPhone Developer Program User Guide below). The availability date is of particular interest: this date will be listed as the release date on your application’s product page in the store. You’ll need to update it if your application is approved after your availability date and you wish to be displayed at the top of lists sorted by release date — Apple will not update it for you. You’ll probably want to change it to the date your application was approved or the day after.
• December 13, 2008 : Paid Applications Contract approved. I’ve heard stories of it taking weeks for other developers to have their contracts approved. Luckily, it only took us a few days, which was fortunate given that we were hoping to have Brain Thaw available for sale before Christmas.
• December 16, 2008 : Brain Thaw approved to the App Store. Hooray! We received the approval e-mail on the evening of the 16th. Brain Thaw was available at the App Store by the following morning with a release date of December 12, 2008 (the availability date we had specified when submitting the application). We changed the availability date to the 17th that morning, a change that was reflected in the release date later that evening.

I highly recommend the following resources if you’re interested in learning more: the iPhone Developer Program User Guide (pdf) and Publishing on the App Store (video). The User Guide is only available to registered iPhone developers: you’ll find a download link on the home page of the iPDP Portal under Portal Resources. Publishing on the App Store is available at the iPhone Dev Center under Getting Started Videos.