jonau : Friday March 6, 2009
Appstore Woes
I have been waiting for 2 weeks for an update to be released for our fairly popular Wobble Premium application (160,000 Paid installs), it contained a few user requested features.
Since uploading that update we have been working on even more features which are nearly ready. To avoid our users having to do 2 updates, I "rejected the binary" yesterday morning my time - about 1/2 way into the day in USA. (for non devs this means removing it so you can replace the installable with a new file)
We now plan to upload a new update early next week with even more features.
BIG PROBLEM!
Today Wobble disappeared from the appstore altogether, who knows where it should really appear since the caching for iTunes/Appstore on iphone is ..um… unpredictable, but Wobbles last recorded position was 53 overall and 8th in Entertainment in the USA. That position means about 1500 sales a day. It now does not appear in the top 100 overall OR in the top 100 Entertainment<!>
Yesterdays sales reports were half of what I expected. So a drop from about 1600 to 700 in one day. It had been tracking downwards gradually - so this was a big drop.
I suspect it disappeared for some people yesterday, and I am just seeing it disappear today when my iTunes grabbed a new copy of the list…
I’ve called and emailed Apple numerous times, with no response. Predictably.
I just checked the details for the rejected binary and the "Availability Date" was set to 6th March. To be clear though - it was still marked "In Review" when I rejected it… so this date *should* be irrelevant. I just edited that date out to end 2010 as a test.
Two days missing from the charts will cause the App to drop out of the charts altogether - whereas we had been thinking it would do 1000 a day for a while.
I’m kinda annoyed.
Any thoughts?
Does anyone in the USA see Wobble in the top 100 chart (entertainment or overall?
Wobble Bikini Fun is number 22 in Entertainment in France.
Good luck.
[...] it looks like it is probably a moving average of some sort. The big dip is when Wobble accidentally fell out of the Appstore as you can see it climbed back, but we lost about 4000 sales and a fair bit of [...]