Shaun Austin just made an interesting comment
today on Twitter. I
cannot comment that this is true, but I certainly hope it is. Because
having to wait one week for an update sucks and having to wait one month
for a first release does suck too. Of course, you know about that old
trick that iPhone developers and marketers (I hate that word) used to
get back on the first page of their category: create a small update,
even once a week, resubmit it, and when the update is done, change the
release date to the day it’s done. That allowed your app to come back
from the deepness of page 324 of the AppStore to the first page of the
category. Of course, it is still not as good as the very very first
page. But it provided a nice bump in sales. You can see that bump thing
on this graph of GPSRecorder sales.
I
stopped using that trick in a regular way for 321run. I am not making as
many updates as used to do. I now test them more thoroughly, and add
more features in each update (I almost always added features in updates,
except when there is a ridiculously crashing bug). In 321Run, there was
a 1.0, a 1.1, a 1.2 and (unfortunately) a 1.2.1. Over the course of 6
months. All in all, if that change of the publication has such an impact
on the review process, I say wonderful. Imagine 100 0000 apps being
updated regularly, and picture the army you would need to do it.