How can I reserve an iPhone app name in apple's developer portal?

Question

I want to reserve an app name that I intend to build out over the next 90 days, how do I do this in apple's web developer portal?

Answer 1

Update 2015:

The limit of 180 days is now gone, Apple dropped the cap this year - You can read the full licence here, gone.

Also, you may have noticed that the app name expiring topic is gone from the contact us question tree in iTunes Connect.

That being said, as you can see in the declaration:

You will not, directly or indirectly, commit ... (e.g., submitting fraudulent reviews of Your own Application or any third party application, choosing a name for Your Application that is substantially similar to the name of a third party application in order to create consumer confusion, or squatting on application names to prevent legitimate third party use.

This lets us suppose that if you haven't updated your binary for a looong time and someone wants to use the same name, chances are that if they ask for it, they will get it, but yeah, technically speaking, you don't need to worry about this anymore.

Update 2014:

As stated in the iOS Developer Library, the limit is now 180 days:

Note: After you create your app and assign it a name, you have 180 days to deliver a binary or else your app will be deleted from iTunes Connect so that the app name is free for use by the developer community. Per section 3.2 of the iOS Developer Program License Agreement, squatting on an app name to prevent legitimate third-party use is prohibited. For information about email alerts you will receive to remind you of this policy, see “App Name Expiry.”

Answer 2

90 days you say? This wouldn't be the first project that was supposed to take 90 days but needed more.

Once you fill in the information in itunes connect you have 120 days. After these 120 days your app name will become available for other developers. Yes, others, you can't take it again.

So you better make sure that you have your app ready for sale in 120 days.

You should read the itunes connect developer guide. It explains the process in detail. It's too complicated to answer this in a 5 minute stackoverflow answer. But the others outlined it, and I just wanted to mention = the 120 day limit. Happy squatting.