---
title: Drafts & Revisions
description: How Apptonomy tracks your working listing as a draft, publishes it as a revision, and keeps translations in step with your source text.
---

Every change you make to a store listing in Apptonomy lands in a **draft** — a working copy that's separate from what's live on the store. When you publish, that draft becomes a **revision**: a locked snapshot of exactly what was pushed. The draft, the revision history, and the per-language translations behind them are all part of one model.

## Why it matters

You rarely rewrite an entire listing in one sitting. You edit a title today, adopt an AI-suggested description next week, and translate everything before a launch. The draft holds all of that in-progress work in one place — per store — so nothing goes to Apple or Google until you deliberately publish. Once you do, the revision record tells you what changed and when, which is what you fall back on when a store metric moves and you need to know what you shipped.

## How to read it

### The lifecycle: draft → published → archived

- **Draft** — the editable working copy. There is one draft per store (App Store and Google Play each have their own). Everything you do in the Asset Editor writes here.
- **Published** — when you publish, the draft is locked into a numbered revision and its contents are pushed to the store. A published revision is a permanent, read-only snapshot.
- **Archived** — older published revisions are retained as history. They're never edited; they're the paper trail of what your listing looked like over time.

After a publish completes, Apptonomy opens a **fresh empty draft** for that store automatically, so your next round of edits starts clean without touching what you just shipped.

### Revisions are per store

App Store and Google Play are tracked as independent streams. Each has its own draft and its own revision numbers (Revision #1, #2, and so on). Publishing to one store never touches the other. Use the store switcher at the top of the project to move between them — you're always editing one store's draft at a time.

### Staleness: two things to watch

**Your draft vs. the live listing.** In each field editor, Apptonomy shows the current live value ("Live on App Store" / "Live on Google Play") directly above your draft ("Next Version"). When the two differ, a diff appears so you can see exactly how far your draft has moved from what's published. An unpublished draft can sit for weeks — the live comparison is how you tell whether your draft is still ahead of, or has drifted from, the current listing.

**Translations vs. your source text.** When you edit the text in your source language, any existing translations of that field for other languages become **stale** — they were generated from an older version of the source. Apptonomy detects this and shows a banner on the affected language offering to **Retranslate** or **Keep current**. Staleness is per language and per field, so editing one field doesn't invalidate translations you're happy with elsewhere.

### Locale override provenance: auto-translated vs. overridden

For every non-source language, each field carries a note of where its value came from:

- **Auto-translated** — Apptonomy generated it from your source text.
- **Overridden** — you edited that language's value by hand.

The distinction matters because a manual override is treated as intentional: retranslating won't silently overwrite it, and the stale banner lets you choose whether to keep your wording or refresh from the source. This is what lets you hand-tune a headline for one market while leaving the rest on auto-translate.

## How it connects to what you do

- You build the draft field by field in the [Store Text editor](/docs/editing/asset-editor-store-text) and by [replacing icon and screenshots](/docs/editing/asset-editor-visuals).
- You can seed fields from [AI-suggested content](/docs/editing/ai-suggested-content) generated by your latest audit.
- Translations follow the languages you configure under [target languages](/docs/localization/target-languages); see [listing localization](/docs/guides/listing-localization) for the full workflow.
- When the draft is ready, you [publish it](/docs/publishing/publish-a-revision) and track the result in [Publishing History](/docs/publishing/publishing-history).

## Related

- [Edit store text](/docs/editing/asset-editor-store-text)
- [Adopt AI-suggested content](/docs/editing/ai-suggested-content)
- [Publish a revision](/docs/publishing/publish-a-revision)
- [Publishing History](/docs/publishing/publishing-history)
- [Listing localization](/docs/guides/listing-localization)