Bug in App Store Causes Apps to Disappear

A few app developers are reporting that their apps have disappeared from the App store. This happened to one of my apps, WristPop Coin Toss , and has happened to one other app that I know of, Kana. Customers attempting to purchase one of these applications were greeted with a message that the app is no longer available on the store.

The bug that is causing this is in the Itunes Connect Management Application and can happen after changing the price of an application. Here is a screen grab of the pricing tab


Notice that the availability date for this application is December 22nd 2009. If you hit save at this point your application will disappear from the store for almost a year. This is really a rookie HTML mistake, for some reason the current year is not in the select list and so the browser selects the first year in the list.

All is not lost. If you made this mistake or you need to update your price for an application, you can select today's date from the drop downs and hit save. You application will reappear in the store within an hour. Your release date will not change.

This happened to both of the apps mentioned above after the end of the New Year's App Blowout, which was great fun!

A special thanks to macgicDave for passing this on and twitter of course for bringing it into my ambient field.