Apple retired four app statuses on one day in 2024, and the old words are still in its own tools.
On 8 February 2024, one entry in Apple's App Store Connect release notes changed four app statuses at once. Ready for Sale was renamed Ready for Distribution. Developer Removed from Sale, Removed from Sale and Pending Agreement stopped being app statuses at all. The reference page that lists statuses today carries 16 app statuses, 5 submission statuses, 5 item statuses and 14 App Store availability statuses, and the phrase Ready for Sale does not appear anywhere on it. Every count and every quote below was read from Apple's own help pages on 17 October 2026. Most people meet this while publishing to the App Store and wondering why the status they were told to wait for is missing.
What follows is the retirement entry in full, the four lists as they stand today, where availability moved to, and the places in Apple's own material where the retired words are still printed. One of them is a button you can click this afternoon.
Start hereThe short version
The names went. The things they described did not.
Nothing was simplified here. One status was renamed and three were deleted, but the facts they reported still have to live somewhere, and they were pushed into two different places. Ready for Sale became Ready for Distribution, which answers a narrower question: the app can be published, not that it is on sale anywhere. Whether it is on sale is now a separate status, held once per country or region, with its own list of 14 values.
Pending Agreement is the clearest case. The status is gone and the blocker is not. It survives as a sentence inside the description of Ready for Distribution: to distribute your app, your agreements must be in effect, and the Account Holder can accept the latest agreements in the Business section. If you are waiting on an unsigned agreement today, nothing in the status column will tell you so.
Which app statuses did Apple actually retire, and when?
Four of them, in one entry, on 8 February 2024. Apple's own words: this update includes changes to app statuses, Ready for Sale has been renamed to Ready for Distribution, and now indicates that your app can be published. To view if your app is available on the App Store, visit Pricing and Availability. Developer Removed from Sale, Removed from Sale, and Pending Agreement are no longer app statuses. The rest of that same entry is about alternative app distribution in the European Union, which is probably why the status change travelled so badly.
That is the whole published record, and it is worth being precise about what it covers. The release notes page is one long list, 184 dated entries when we read it on 17 October 2026, running from 12 July 2022 to 15 October 2026. The 8 February 2024 entry names those four statuses and no others. It gives no deprecation window, no migration note and no mention of the App Store Connect API, which matters later, because the API did not follow on the same day.
One thing the entry does not do is explain a second rename that also happened. Processing for App Store is now Processing for Distribution. We searched the whole release notes page for both strings on 17 October 2026 and neither occurs anywhere on it, so that change is not recorded there. We cannot tell you when it happened. If it predates 12 July 2022 this page would not show it either way, and we have not found a first party page that dates it. That is an honest gap, not a finding.
Apple, App Store Connect release notes, read 17 October 2026
What does the current reference list, and how many of each?
Four tables, not one, which is the first thing people get wrong when they quote a count. Counted off the page on 17 October 2026: 16 app statuses, 5 submission statuses, 5 item statuses and 14 App Store availability statuses. The app status, in Apple's wording, indicates where an app is in the review and release process. A submission status covers a whole submission to App Review. An item status covers one item inside that submission, which is how you end up with one accepted screenshot set and one rejected in-app event in the same queue.
The 16 app statuses are Prepare for Submission, Ready for Review, Invalid Binary, Waiting for Review, In Review, Accepted, Waiting for Export Compliance, Pending Developer Release, Processing for Distribution, Pending Apple Release, Pending App Transfer, Processing App Transfer, Ready for Distribution, Rejected, Metadata Rejected and Developer Rejected. Apple colours them: red means you have to do something before the app distributes, yellow means a process controlled by you or by Apple is still running, and green means the app is Ready for Distribution. Exactly one status is green. Three are red, and all three are a kind of rejection, which is the part worth reading in advance if you want to know why apps get rejected.
Now the absence, stated carefully. We searched the text of that reference page on 17 October 2026 for four exact strings: Ready for Sale, Removed from Sale, Developer Removed from Sale and Pending Agreement. None of them occurs on it. That is a claim about one page, and only that page, and it is the page Apple's own help sends you to from the availability articles. It is not a claim about the whole of Apple's documentation, and the next section is about why that distinction matters.
Apple, App and submission statuses, App Store Connect Help, read 17 October 2026
Look it up
An old status name, and what it is now
Pick the name you were given. Every old name below comes from Apple's own release notes or its own API reference, not from a forum.
Ready for Sale
Where the old name comes from: Named in the App Store Connect release note of 8 February 2024 as renamed.
What you see today: Ready for Distribution. It is the only green app status on the current reference, and its description adds that your agreements must be in effect before the app distributes.
Where the word survives: Still printed on the Publish for pre-order help page, and still a value in the deprecated AppStoreVersionState enum of the App Store Connect API.
Read from Apple's App Store Connect Help and its App Store Connect API reference on 17 October 2026. Apple can change any of this without a release note, as two of the rows above show.
Where does availability live now?
In Pricing and Availability, one status per country or region. The 8 February 2024 release note says so itself, in the same breath as the rename: to view if your app is available on the App Store, visit Pricing and Availability. The path in App Store Connect today, from Apple's help page on managing availability, read 17 October 2026: in Apps, select the app, click Pricing and Availability in the sidebar, scroll to the App Availability section, then click Set Up Availability the first time and Manage after that. Under Availability you see the App Store status for each of the 175 countries and regions where the App Store operates. The role you need is Account Holder, Admin or App Manager.
This is a different vocabulary, not the same list in a new place. Apple calls these App Store statuses, and says the App Store status tells you whether your app is available in a specific country or region, or if there are any reasons your app is not appearing somewhere. Most of the 14 values exist to name a reason: Missing App Rating, Missing Tax Form, Missing Game registration number, ICP Filing Number Missing, ICP Filing Number Invalid, and a catch all called Cannot Sell App that asks you to hover the status to find out why. Three more are transitional, each with the same 24 hour promise: Processing to Available, Processing to Not Available and Processing to Pre-Order. None of that information was expressible in a single app status, which is a reasonable argument for the change.
Removal moved with it, and this is where the old word refuses to die. Deselect a country in that dialog and Apple says the app will be removed from the App Store there, people who already downloaded it keep receiving updates, and it stays redownloadable from purchase history as long as the necessary contract is active. Changes take effect immediately but can take up to 24 hours to be visible to everyone. To go further, scroll to the bottom of the same Pricing and Availability page and click the button, which is still labelled Remove App From Sale. Pulling a single bad version is a third control again, Last-Compatible Version Settings at the bottom of that page, and Apple adds that if the version is Ready for Distribution and has a legal or usability issue you must submit an update rather than hide it. If your worry is the opposite, holding a release back rather than removing it, that belongs to a phased release and the version release options beside it.
Apple, App Store availability statuses, read 17 October 2026
Why do the old names keep coming back?
Because Apple is still printing them, in three places we read on 17 October 2026. The first is a help page in the same section as the availability articles: Publish for pre-order says that an app offered for pre-order must have at least one country or region where it is already Ready for Sale to be included in a new app bundle. Two years and eight months after the rename, in the same help guide that no longer defines the term. The second is that Remove App From Sale button. The status went, the control kept the word.
The third is the App Store Connect API, and it is the one that will bite a script. The API reference still publishes an enum called AppStoreVersionState, marked deprecated with a one line note to use AppVersionState instead. It carries 20 values, among them READY_FOR_SALE, PREORDER_READY_FOR_SALE, PROCESSING_FOR_APP_STORE, REMOVED_FROM_SALE, DEVELOPER_REMOVED_FROM_SALE and PENDING_CONTRACT. Every retired name is still documented there, with no date and no pointer to the release note that retired it.
The replacement enum does not match the help page either, which is the last thing to know before you build anything on top of a status string. AppVersionState lists 15 values and uses READY_FOR_DISTRIBUTION and PROCESSING_FOR_DISTRIBUTION, so the rename did land. But it also carries REPLACED_WITH_NEW_VERSION, which does not appear on the help page at all, and the help page lists Pending App Transfer and Processing App Transfer, which the enum does not carry. Sixteen names on one page, fifteen on the other, three of them unique to one side. Treat an unknown status string as a thing that happens, not as a bug in your code.
Apple, App Store Connect release notes, entry dated 8 February 2024
The four lists on the reference page, counted
| The list | Entries | What it reports on | Contains Ready for Sale |
|---|---|---|---|
| App statuses | 16 | Where a version sits in review and release | No |
| Submission statuses | 5 | A whole submission to App Review | No |
| Item statuses | 5 | One item inside a submission | No |
| App Store availability statuses | 14 | Whether the app is live in one country or region | No |
Counted from the tables on Apple's App and submission statuses reference on 17 October 2026. The last column is an exact string search of that page, and it is the only page we checked.
Where this lands if a builder generated your app
You are the one watching the status column, whoever or whatever wrote the code. App Store Review Guideline 4.2.6, read on 17 October 2026, is the reason: apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service will be rejected unless they are submitted directly by the provider of the app's content. So the account is yours, the submission is yours, and so is the job of working out why a version has sat in Processing for Distribution past the 24 hours Apple promises.
Newly is an AI app builder. You describe an app in plain English and it writes a real React Native and Expo project that you own, with two way GitHub sync. It uploads iOS builds to TestFlight, publishes to Google Play internal testing and builds a standalone Android package. It does not press submit on the App Store for you, because Apple requires the owner of the content to do that. It costs from $25 a month and there is no free tier. The practical effect on this page is narrow: it gets you to the point where a status exists to read, and after that you are in App Store Connect like everyone else.
Two habits save time once you are there. Turn on webhooks, which Apple offers for app status changes, so you find out from your own server instead of refreshing a page. And open History in the app sidebar when something looks stuck, because it records each status, the time it changed and who caused it, which settles most arguments in a minute. Neither of them costs anything, which is more than can be said for the rest of what an app costs to maintain.
Questions people ask about retired App Store statuses
No. Apple's App Store Connect release notes, in the entry dated 8 February 2024, say that Ready for Sale has been renamed to Ready for Distribution and now indicates that your app can be published. The current App and submission statuses reference does not contain the string Ready for Sale anywhere, checked on 17 October 2026. It does contain Ready for Distribution, as the only green status in the app statuses table.
Get something in the status column first
A retired status name is a problem you only get to have once you have a build uploaded and an app record to read. Describe the app, get it onto TestFlight, and learn the vocabulary from your own account rather than from a five year old tutorial.
Start building