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After an update to the portal used by iPhone app developers yesterday, many developers are reporting that the screenshots for their apps have gone missing. Instead the app store just shows grey rectangles where the images should be.

In our case, our most recent app has suffered from this and it has had a very bad effect on our rankings. Over night we have dropped by over 50 positions in the business chart after weeks of hard work promoting it. Needless to say we are not happy about this at all. I contacted iPhone development support via the number given on the website only to be told that there is nothing they could do and my only option was to email the relevant department via their online form. My past experience of this is that it takes them 3 or 4 days to respond. I have done this anyway in the hope that they will listen and respond in a timely manor but i’m not expecting a quick response.

Looking into this a bit further, it would appear that apps released yesterday all have missing screen shots and reading the forums where developers hangout suggests that it effects apps that were just released. The odd thing is that our app has been available in the app store for a little while now (although it does have an update waiting for review). So in reality I have no idea what is happening, all I do know is that our sales have been dramatically effected and our app will disappear from the charts by later this evening.

The really frustrating thing is that although Apple will fix this, they will not do anything to compensate for the loss of earnings due to their incompetence and lack of testing (ring a bell – iPhone 4 – loss of signal?). The least I would expect from Apple is for them to restore all of our positions as of yesterday and to re-release new apps.

Come on Apple do the right thing!

I will keep this post updated with the feedback from apple.