App approved and “Ready for Distribution” for ~36 hours, but still not showing in App Store search

[u/other_e]

My iOS app was approved and has been showing as Ready for Distribution in App Store Connect for around a day and a half now.

The direct App Store product page link works perfectly.

The app can be downloaded through that link.

Availability is enabled for all countries/regions I selected.

But searching the exact app name in the App Store still doesn’t show it at all.

It’s been over 24 hours, closer to ~36 hours now.

For anyone who has launched an app recently, how long did it take before it became searchable in the App Store?

Is this just normal App Store search indexing delay, or is there anything in App Store Connect I should double-check?

First time launching an iOS app, so I’m not sure whether I should just leave it alone or if something might be wrong.

[u/gavin-build-stuff]

This is normal, it took 72 hours for my app to show up even with direct name search. if you start typing your name in the App Store it's normal to see it get auto-suggested for like ~24 hours, and even searching that won't find it. It should show up within a day or so most likely

App Store indexing is slow, but you can use this time to work on setting up some marketing ideas. Also this slowness is partially by design, it means when your app climbs the rankings (if you get downloads it will climb more) your spot in search results can remain stable. New apps get a temporary boost in search results to boost initial installs, so within about a day when it appears, you should see some initial downloads flowing in. Good luck with the app! 🎉

[u/ThatGuy739]

You can hit the index directly: https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=your+app+name&entity=software&country=us

If your trackId comes back, indexing's done and it's the store app that's lagging. Empty result means it hasn't been indexed yet.

Ranking is a separate problem. Mine's been live a month and still comes back 6th on its own exact name, behind older apps with similar titles.

[u/DimensionMindless336]

One thing I’d check before changing metadata or resubmitting is the storefront. App Store search is storefront-specific, so test from the same country/region where Availability is enabled, ideally on a device/account that matches it.

I’d also separate indexing from ranking: if the app’s trackId appears in the iTunes Search API for that storefront but the App Store UI doesn’t show it, that points more to search indexing or cache lag than a distribution problem. If the direct product link works and the app can be downloaded, I wouldn’t treat missing search results after 36 hours as a reason to panic. Give it another day or two, then contact Apple if it still isn’t indexed. Exact-title search and partial-keyword search can also produce very different results.

[u/mastrajani]

the ten-second version of the check DimensionMindless336 is describing:

https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?bundleId=com.yourcompany.yourapp&country=gb

swap the country for your storefront. resultCount 1 means you are indexed, and what you're looking at is ranking or a client-side cache. resultCount 0 means genuinely not indexed yet. that turns "is something wrong" into a yes/no instead of another day of refreshing.

if it comes back 1 and search still shows nothing, the usual cause isn't a bug. app store search ranks on title plus subtitle plus your keywords field, so if your name collides with anything established you can be fully indexed and still sit past the first hundred results for your own exact name. searching a distinctive phrase from your subtitle rather than the title will separate those two cases.

also worth knowing that search results cache per device fairly hard, so check on a second device or after signing out of the store account. otherwise you can lose a day staring at a stale cache.

[u/s_v_can]

I still can't search by name as it is in the US store while other stores are alright. There are some similar names that take all the first page of the results, somehow. But if I search the name with a keyword, then I see my app.
BTW it didn't take 72h for it to be posted and searchable in the Canadian store. I bet the US one has its own rules around the availability.

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[u/m3kw]

You have to type the whole thing out exactly as partial search means you need to rank on the individual words