Last Monday, Rogue Amoeba's first iPhone product Radioshift Touch was finally released through the App Store. After many months, we're very happy to have finally shipped. Doing so, however, has highlighted a few glitches in the App Store that developers face. Our own developer Mike Ash detailed his own travails with the App Store a few months back, when he released an application called NetAwake. While we didn't run into anything quite this frustrating, we did hit a few snags.

Pre-release Glitch: An Official Way Of Controlling The Release

First up, we wanted to be in control of our own release date. The standard process is to submit your application for review by Apple. When it passes review, it will show up in the App Store, ready for sale. The problem is this gives virtually no warning as to when your application will be live and ready for sale. We desired more control of when the software would be made available.

To this end, we used a trick suggested by Craig Hockenberry, whose furbo.org should be mandatory reading for all iPhone developers. That trick is to adjust the Availability Date. In the Pricing section of the Application information on iTunes Connect (the site used by developers to release software), there's a setting for the Availability Date of the application, as seen below:

When we submitted the software, we set this date very far in the future. Once approved, the date can then be changed to the desired date of release (December 15th, in this case). This worked out in terms of the software being available at the appropriate time, but it doesn't appear to be an official method. Further, using this setting caused multiple glitches on the store.

Pre-release Glitch: (In)Availability

The software was approved on December 7th, just 3 days after being posted, and we were pleased with the speed of this review. Once it passed, we selected the 15th as our ship date. However, between the 7th and the 15th, we began appearing in various search results. A search for "Radioshift" would bring up Rogue Amoeba, but no products. This was, of course, quite confusing, and we had contact from eager users wondering what was up.

Release-time Glitch: Searching

On the 15th, right around midnight EST, the software popped up. Then it was gone again. Then back. This repeated several times over the next couple of hours. The best we can figure is that the iTunes Store was updating across multiple machines, and they were often out of sync. The search results were non-deterministic, making it impossible to know if others would see the proper search results.

Post-release Glitch: Release Date

Once the software was finally up, we had several other problems to sort out.

First off, our Release Date was listed as December 7th, not December 15th. This was the date we were approved, of course, but it was not when the software was released in any sense that makes sense for the consumer. We tried to determine what was going on, finally stumbling on this piece of information from Apple:

Q: Does the "Released" date displayed for my application in the App Store have an effect on my application?

A: The "Released" date listed as part of basic app information listed on the App Store is for display purposes only. The "Released" date is currently determined by the date of the app's approval by Apple and the date that the developer has listed for the app's availability within iTunes Connect, whichever is earlier.

I'm not certain what "for display purposes only" means, but the Release Date is used by the store to determine the What's New list, among other things. That meant that Radioshift Touch first appeared there on the 15th, with a date of the 7th, putting us several pages deep on the list. We lost on some eyeballs because of this, which was unfortunate.

I can't figure any reason why the date should be listed as anything but the date of the app's approval by Apple or the date that the developer has listed the app's availability within iTunes Connect, whichever is later. That would make it the date that the software was first released to users, which seems obvious and logical.

Post-release Glitch: Keyword Search

The second post-release glitch we noticed was with searching the store. Our application is named "Radioshift Touch", but it does not (currently) appear in a search for the word "radio". As our application plays radio streams from around the world, this is perhaps the most obvious search we'd like to show up under. It's not clear what search is doing, though it does seem to find all applications with the word "radio" in their name, as well as several others. I'm hopeful that the indexing of application summaries just takes a few days. Otherwise, we may have to change the display name in the App Store to "Radio shift Touch", just to workaround this glitch.

Update, 12/21/08: I later noticed, after a week of using it, that this search had "More Results", and Radioshift Touch does appear there. Perhaps I'm merely blind, but a quick sampling showed that several acquaintances also missed it, so the UI seems a bit lacking. Further, there's no indication as to how these results are sorted.

Post-release Glitch: Seller Name/No Preview

When we looked at our listing in the App Store, we noticed that I was personally listed as the seller. Of course, this quite incorrect and our company Rogue Amoeba Software should be listed as the seller. It looks like my name was on our Developer account, causing this glitch. The problem is, we had no way of seeing this before the software went live.

Ultimately, this is a minor problem, and a call to the Apple Developer Connection indicates that they'll get it sorted out in a few days. The bigger issue, however, is a lack of previewing. When an application is added to iTunes Connect, everything is done in pieces. The software itself is uploaded, as are multiple screenshots, an icon, a description, and more. The first time we saw all of this together (and spotted a couple typos and inconsistencies) was when the software appeared live on the store. It would be very helpful to be able to preview how everything will look, prior to "shipping".

Time Will Tell

As I noted in my previous post, we've seen slow but valuable changes from Apple. I'm hopeful that highlighting problems that remain will lead to them being fixed as well. The App Store has potential to be great for developers as well as users, but improvements are needed.