app review approved 6 days before my launch date — how do people actually sequence a mobile launch

Small correction to something people usually suggest in these threads. Phased release is for automatic updates going out to people who already have the app. It does not gradually roll a brand new app out to new downloaders. For a 1.0 it does effectively nothing, so do not treat it as a safety net for your launch.

The actual safety net is a server-side kill switch for anything risky and a way to fix content without shipping a binary. If your onboarding copy is wrong or a URL changes, you do not want that to be a five day round trip.

Ship the approved build. Manual release exists for exactly this and you have already done the hard part.

Apple's own line is that most submissions are reviewed inside a day, but that is an average across a pile of trivial updates from established accounts, and it says nothing about the week you happen to submit in. Planning a public date against it is planning against a distribution you cannot see. There have been stretches where reviews visibly slowed for everyone.

The pattern I use now: freeze the launch build about a week out, submit it, hold it with manual release, and keep working on 1.0.1 in a branch. The day after launch you submit the patch with the fixes that accumulated. Nobody downloading on day one knows or cares that three refinements landed 48 hours later.

Release it quietly now, days before the announcement. Let it be live and unmentioned so you can install from the store yourself, check the listing renders properly, and confirm purchases work against production. Then do the launch as a marketing event on your date. A launch is an announcement, not a deploy.

Went through this two months ago and the thing that bit me was not review time at all, it was the store listing metadata. Screenshots, description and keywords are reviewed alongside the build, so if you planned to rewrite the description on launch morning you are submitting again. Get the listing final before you submit the binary, not after.

One more sequencing detail: whatever link you put in the launch post, make it something you control that redirects to the store, not the raw store URL. Then when the store link changes, or you want it going to a landing page in some countries, or you just want to know how many clicks the post produced, you can do that without editing a post that is already circulating.