App Launch Checklist: 30 Steps Before and After Release Day

Most launches fail quietly: the build is fine, but the review notes were missing, the rollout was at 100% when the first crash hit, or nobody was watching the charts when the spike came. This checklist walks through 30 concrete steps, grouped by phase, so release day is a procedure rather than a gamble.

Before you submit (steps 1–8)

1. Freeze the build a week out. Apple says it typically reviews at least half of submissions in under 24 hours and 90% in under 48 hours, but a rejection restarts the clock ¹. Give yourself room for one round-trip.
2. Fill in App Review Information. Provide a working demo login, any special configuration, and a video for features that need hardware or a hard-to-reproduce environment. Apple attributes over 40% of unresolved issues to guideline 2.1, App Completeness ¹.
3. Finalise images and text before submitting. Apple explicitly asks for this; placeholder screenshots are a common cause of delay ¹.
4. Run the Android pre-launch report. Upload the bundle to a test track first. Google's pre-registration help also recommends testing on a track before opening a campaign ⁵.
5. Check the Android vitals thresholds. Google's bad-behaviour thresholds are a 1.09% user-perceived crash rate and a 0.47% user-perceived ANR rate overall, with an 8% per-device-model threshold for both ^7,8. Crossing them can cost you visibility, not just reviews.
6. Set the release to manual. On both stores, choose manual (or scheduled) release so an early approval does not put you live before the press and community work is ready.
7. Decide on a rating reset policy. For a brand-new app this is moot, but if you are relaunching, note that Apple lets you reset the overview rating on a new version; written reviews stay, and the old rating cannot be restored ⁹.
8. Prepare a hotfix branch. Have a version with a bumped build number already set up so a day-one fix is a merge, not a scramble.

Metadata and store page (steps 9–13)

9. Write the title and subtitle for search, not vanity. Your keywords, subtitle, and promotional text are the only text Apple's search sees at launch.
10. Localise at least the top five markets. Charts are per country; a localised listing converts better in each one.
11. Prepare a custom product page for each major campaign so paid traffic lands on creative that matches the ad (limits change; check App Store Connect for the current cap, which rose to 70 pages per app in late 2025 — unverified against Apple's own notes).
12. Choose your primary category deliberately. You rank within it, and it is far easier to enter a category top 100 than the overall chart.
13. Record every metadata value in a single document. When you have to recreate a listing in a new territory or on the other store, this saves hours.

Pre-orders and pre-registration (steps 14–17)

14. Open App Store pre-orders 2–180 days ahead for a first-time release; if your app is already live somewhere, a new region can be pre-ordered up to 365 days out ².
15. Understand what happens on release day. Pre-order customers get a notification and the app downloads automatically to the device they used; paid apps are charged at release, at the lower of the accepted price or the release-day price ².
16. Open Google Play pre-registration. Each country gets a 90-day window from its first day live; if you have not launched in any of them within 90 days the campaign ends everywhere, and you can run at most two apps at a time ⁵. Auto-install is available for apps up to 2 GB (Wi-Fi only above 200 MB) ⁵.
17. Set up a pre-registration reward before the campaign starts. It must be a new one-time product; it cannot be edited or deleted afterwards, and failing to deliver it can lead to suspension ⁵.

Phased release and rollout plan (steps 18–21)

18. Know what Apple's phased release does and does not cover. It applies to version updates delivered via automatic updates over seven days (1%, 2%, 5%, 10%, 20%, 50%, 100%); anyone can still download manually, and you can pause for up to 30 days in total ³. It is not a launch-day throttle for a brand-new app.
19. Use Google Play staged rollout for launch and updates. You choose the percentage; it never rises on its own, and you can halt, then resume to the same user group. Users who already got the build keep it ⁶.
20. Decide the ladder in advance. A written plan such as 5% → 20% → 50% → 100%, each step gated on crash rate and review sentiment, removes decision-making from a stressful day.
21. Limit countries if needed. A production rollout can be restricted to specific countries at the start, but countries cannot be removed once it is running ⁶.

Press, featuring and community (steps 22–25)

22. Nominate for featuring early. Apple asks for at least two weeks' notice and recommends up to three months ahead for broader consideration; nominations go through Featuring Nominations in App Store Connect ⁴.
23. Prepare a press kit with icon, screenshots, a short video, and a fact sheet; journalists and creators rarely ask for what is not already there.
24. Line up community moments. A subreddit post, a Discord announcement, and a newsletter should all go out within the same hour to concentrate downloads.
25. Schedule a launch-day calendar with time zones. The App Store day rolls over per storefront; staggering announcements can spread one spike across two chart days unconfirmed.

Launch day: what to watch (steps 26–28)

26. Crashes first. Check Xcode Organizer or your crash tool every hour for the first six hours. Halt or pause the rollout before fixing; fixing first and halting second is backwards.
27. Reviews second. Reply to every one-star review within the day; a quick reply often turns into an edited rating.
28. Charts third. Track your rank in the overall and category charts per country, not just your home market. Pre-orders flow into download reporting after launch, and Apple states that pre-order volume can contribute to stronger chart placement ¹⁰.

First week (steps 29–30)

29. Ship the hotfix by day three if there is anything above noise in crash reports; a 1.0.1 that lands fast is a signal of care, and it refreshes the "What's New" text.
30. Write the retrospective on day seven. Record daily downloads, best chart position per country, conversion rate, and where the traffic came from. This becomes your baseline for the next release.

How this shows up in the charts

Charts reward concentration. In 2019, Sensor Tower estimated that a non-game app needed a median of roughly 94,000 daily US iPhone downloads to reach No. 1 and about 49,000 for the top 10; the bar for games was higher in most markets ¹¹. Those figures are dated and US-only, but the shape of the lesson holds: a thousand pre-orders fulfilled on one day count for more than the same thousand spread across a month.

That is why pre-orders, pre-registration auto-install, and a single-hour community push all point the same way. The staged rollout is the one tool that works against this, which is why the ladder in step 20 matters: start conservative on Android, climb fast if the vitals stay green, and remember that an iOS phased release does not limit manual downloads at all ³, so a first-version launch on iOS is effectively 100% from the start.

Watch smaller storefronts on day one. A modest campaign that barely registers in the US can put you in the top 50 in Canada, the Nordics or New Zealand, and those placements are visible on the storefront, which brings organic installs on top of what you paid for. Track them side by side; the country where you rank best is usually the country where your next campaign is cheapest.