It seems that the major problems with iPhone and iTunes app store pricing synchronisation have now been resolved – although still not a peep from Apple about what has happened or what was done.
How do I reach this conclusion?
- Firstly I observed that my app’s reviews jumped up from 77 to 94, after having been stuck on 77 since before Christmas.
- Secondly I observed that my earlier modifications to my app description had finally propogated to both iTunes and iPhone app store.
- Thirdly I made some further minor changes to my app description, and found that they correctly propogated to both iTunes and iPhone app store in less than 3 hours.
From this I deduced that the problems with app server synchronization were finally over. I then resubmitted my app price change (from $0.99 to $1.99). This change, along with further app description changes, propagated through the system within a couple of hours. So far I have had no customer complaints about being unable to purchase, and Oz Weather app ranking has remained at #2.
Hopefully we’ll eventually hear something from Apple about this. Or on the other hand they might just close the discussion thread about it on the Apple Developer Forums without a word. For the sake of supporting their developers, I’m really hoping it will be the former, of course.
Ajnaware's Weblog 
Please do make quick post if Apple says anything. I’m following your blog, but not the forums.
I’m not sure it’s 100% fixed yet. I just changed the description and price of Pocket Weather AU, and now when I click on it in iTunes I get an error, telling me that this product is not available in the Australian store…even though it is listed in the top 50.
I figured out what it was, iTunes Connect had defaulted the release date to very late in 2009, meaning that it thought I wanted to remove my app until then. That’s a pretty lousy bug if you ask me. I’ve changed it back to the earliest date I could, and it seems to be happy now, but we are no longer in the top apps of 2008 list (my guess is because our release date is in 2009. There’s no way to change the release date to anything earlier than today, so I think that might be permanently broken! Thanks a bunch Apple, thanks a bunch.
Just received an email response from Apple – from a real person. Those who thought it would take until 5th Jan were right. 🙂 I’ll report back if anything worthwhile comes out of our exchanges.
Just received this response from Apple iTunes Connect support: “This issue has been resolved. Please let us know if you encounter the error again.”
Also, the thread in the developer forums I referred to in my earlier post was apparently deleted on 5th Jan, not long after I referred Apple support to my blog posts for further information on the issue.
Looks like we’re not going to get any explanation at all from Apple. 😦