As a note of warning to other devs, I recently had an experience where an app update was approved, the new version showed up on the app store, and then had a grand total of 2 purchases and 160 updates before the app mysteriously began refusing to download. The app was visible in the App Store and it showed up in users’ list of updates, but clicking on the install or purchase button would give the message “This item is no longer available in the App Store”.
As you’re likely already aware, sometimes there are glitches as new releases propagate through the caching and backend iTunes databases, so I wasn’t immediately concerned. After 12 hours or so, though, it started to become more worrying.
But what to check? The release date set in iTunes Connect was well in the past. We hadn’t received any email from Apple. There were the admittedly tiny but nonetheless present customer purchase and update counts. And of course, there was the reassuring green dot and “Ready for Sale” app status.
Hmmm…maybe the availability date should be more recent. Ok, I guess I’ll set it to yesterday, when the app was actually released. But what’s this?!? The date has magically bumped to today, and the formerly steady green app status indicator is now yellow with an alarming “Pending contract” message!
20 minutes of clicking through contracts and refreshing web pages was enough to resolve the immediate issue, which turned out to be that Apple wanted some contact information updated. But the bigger problem seems to be that an app can end up in this state at all with no notification to the developer and no indication in iTunes Connect that there is an issue. I’ve filed this issue with Apple and hopefully they’re working to resolve it, but in the meantime it’s something to watch out for.
TL;DR — Do not rely on the “Ready for sale” and green status indicators in iTunes Connect. Manually verify your contracts, availability dates, contact info, etc., especially if customers and users start seeing messages saying “This item is no longer available in the App Store” or “This item is temporarily unavailable”.
-Geoff