MobileApps

Last week, Apple published changes to the App Store. There’s a really great article at AppleInsider which provides details about the changes.

One of the changes affects the way applications are listed in their category. There’s a good blogpost by Krishna Vegesna which describes the consequences of the previous ordering of the applications. With the latest changes to the App Store applications are sorted by the date they were first release now. However, the release date can be easily changed by the application developer via the iTunes Connect website. The related form field can be found on the “Pricing” tab when editing the application information. Changing the date almost immediately results in updates to the App Store.

To see if there is an actual loop hole I have set the release date for TimeTracker to October 7th this morning. And indeed there is a problem! So this could be easily exploited by developers who want to push the sales of their applications artificially.

However, the changes to the release date seems to affect only the sorting of the application in its primary category which is a little confusing, too.

I hope that Apple will offer a solution to this problem soon to provide the same chances to all developers and all the apps on the store!

Once your application is on the App Store users can leave comments to let you know what they think about your product. That is a really great thing to get in touch with the users in an easy way.

The only drawback is that the developer is not able to access these comments in one single place. Instead you have to switch to each single country in iTunes, go the the App Store and open the product page of your application. Then you are able to read the reviews for this country. This is very time consuming of course. It gets even worse if you have more than one application for sale.

I always thought about writing a little script to access the product page of my application for each country and get the reviews directly. Because the communication between the iTunes frontend and the backend systems at Apple is based on XML I thought that this should be possible to do. Unfortunately, I never found time to actually work on this idea.

This morning I browsed the Apple Developer Discussion forum and came across a thread which discusses this topic. And there I found a blog post written by Erica Sadun which describes a Perl script which does exactly the thing I wanted to have. I have not tried it yet but it looks very promising!