iTunes Connect: now you can schedule price changes and release dates!

Now you can schedule a series of price changes for those apps that will go into effect automatically on their target dates, effectively being able to plan promotions and do some real marketing on your apps on autopilot once you’ve planned your campaign (standing ovation please!).

iTunes Connect is Apple’s developers and publishers portal, which is notoriously not a great web app. Its features are really bare-bones and when you work with it, you feel like stuck in a pre Web 2.0 era, especially for people like us who are used to build and deal with cutting edge Rails web apps.

So every time Apple’s team adds a minor feature is an event to celebrate for us :) … The ability to pre-schedule for a specific release date for new and updated applications has been available for a while. The point is that you need to schedule for a date that is far enough to allow you to get through the review process before it.

So what’s new in what we can do? A publisher can choose to release an app on a certain date under, i.e. pricing tier 1 ($0.99), and pre-schedule the price to rise to tier 2 ($1.99) two weeks later. Successive price changes could also be scheduled in the interface; it’s not limited to two entries.

Considering they do great with their products and their software, why Apple can’t make their web apps as good as their products? This feature should have been available since day one together with decent sales analytics (like AppFigure’s), usage analytics (like Flurry) and a strategic partnership with an ads network.