How do they get in touch with that "App Store Business Management" they spoke about? It's not like they make their emails available for any Joe Developer to talk to them.
Apple is being very helpful these days, and they want developers to succeed. That is why you really should keep in touch with App Store Business Management and keep them updated on what you’re building and when you’re getting ready for a launch.
It's a highly rarefied group of developers who have a contact in App Store management that would be interested in hearing about an upcoming launch.
We have two apps that have had nearly 4 million downloads across both app stores. Here's been the growth of our Mac app, for example: http://qbix.com/calendar . Our average reviews are very close to 5 stars out of 5 after thousands of reviews.
It's all organic. People just found us in the store. We were never contacted by Apple to get featured, and we had no way of contacting them, that we knew of. So I'm curious. It's not just about numbers.
That also makes their advice on this point rather difficult to apply. It's sort of like this marketing advice:
"It can be really helpful if the New York Times writes a two-pager about you. You should call up your contact on the editorial team in advance and tell them about what you're doing, so the story will be ready on launch day."
For us, we launched our first web app in 2008 even before the App Store. Apple loved it - they called us and told about App Store that is being launched so they wanted us to be there on day 1. We consistently delivered great products that people loved. Here, I wrote a post on how to get featured on the App Store http://denzhadanov.com/2014/03/26/how-to-get-featured-on-the...
I have been a solo mac developer for the past 15 years or so (you can see my stuff at http://macdaddy.io), and I have never been able to attend a WWDC. It does strike me as unfair when I see other companies having the opportunity to attend, getting advice and recognition, and then getting featured by Apple and so forth. I have seen other companies allowed to have their apps on the mac app store which require root access, while I write a competing app data recovery app and it's never allowed on the mac app store - only to see that they blogged about attending WWDC and rubbing shoulders with the right people at Apple. Sometimes I feel that I write good software, but I lack the political connections to make real progress.
Our apps have been featured dozens of times and there is definitely a method to the madness. I shared my 2 cents on how to get featured as a comment on that HN link.