Why is my iOS Newsstand cover no longer updated by the Atom feed?

Question

I have several newsstand apps, and the Atom feed is connected to iTunesConnect to update the latest release metadata (title, cover, summary).

I’ve been having problems in recent weeks - iTunesConnect did not update data from new releases that were published and appeared in the Atom feed. To verify this, I deleted the Atom feed URL, deleted all of the covers in iTunesConnect, and added the feed URL again, which resulted in the data and artwork of the older post being taken as the “current issue”.

The format of my feed has not changed, the PNG size on the screen is the correct size (height 1024 pixels), and it works almost a year ago.

Does anyone else have such a problem? Has Apple Changed Something?

My channel is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:news='http://itunes.apple.com/2011/Newsstand'> <updated>2013-10-09T00:00:24Z</updated> <entry> <id>MM_020</id> <updated>2013-10-09T00:00:24Z</updated> <published>2013-10-09T00:00:00Z</published> <summary>summary text</summary> <news:cover_art_icons> <news:cover_art_icon size='SOURCE' src='http://www.myserver.com/path/to/cover.png' /> </news:cover_art_icons> </entry> <entry> ... </feed> 

Answer 1

OK, it seems I found at least a hack:

Previously, the general updated date of the feed (3rd line) was always set to the date of publication of the current problem (because this is the date the feed was last modified, right?).

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:news='http://itunes.apple.com/2011/Newsstand'> <updated>2014-08-27T09:37:01Z</updated> ... 

Now I set the updated date always to the current date / time, regardless of the last publication date. This seems to make Apple reload the content and refresh the cover of the problem.

Answer 2

We have the same problem with dozens of our magazines at the Apple newsstand at the company I work for. We filled out a bug report in Apple Reporter, we sent them 15 app identifiers related to the problem, no response.