With iPhones and iPads becoming an exceedingly commonplace sighting on college campuses, it makes sense for App developers to try to pitch their wares to universities for bulk licensing deals. The only problem: due to the way App Store sales work, it just wasn’t possible — until now.
Apple has just launched the “App Store Volume Purchase” program, which allows developers to offer up a discount of 50% to educational institutes. The catch: as the name implies, this is a bulk deal only (requiring at least 20 copies of an application to be purchased before the discount is applied) and it’s something that your university needs to organize — in other words, don’t go trying to use your .edu address to get a lone copy of DoodleJump on the cheap.
Additionally, Apple’s just pushed out something developers have been clamoring for since day two of the App Store: Version Release control. As it stood before, application updates went live the instant they were approved, whether the developer was ready or not — now, developers are free to push the updated App up to the store whenever they’re ready (as long as Apple already gave it the green light, of course).