Why is my iOS Newsstand cover not updated by the Atom feed anymore?

Question

I have a couple of Newsstand apps out, with an Atom feed connected in iTunesConnect to update the latest issue metadata (title, cover image, summary).

In the last weeks, I experienced problems - iTunesConnect did not update the data from new issues that were published and appeared in the Atom feed. To test things out, I deleted the Atom feed URL, deleted all covers in iTunesConnect and added the feed URL it again, which resulted in the data and cover of an older entry being taken as "current issue".

The format of my feed has not changed, the cover PNGs have the correct dimension (1024 pixel height) and it has been working for almost a year before.

Anybody else having this problem? Has Apple changed something?

My feed looks like this:

<?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, seems I found at least a hack:

Previously, the overall feed updated date (3rd line) was always set to the publishing date of the current issue (because that is the date when the feed content last changed, 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 latest publishing date. This seems to force Apple to reload the contents and update the issue cover.

Answer 2

We are having the same issue with tens of our magazines in Apple's newsstand in the company I work. We filled a bug report on Apple's bug reporter, we've sent them 15 app ids related to the problem with no response.