“Be ready to mobilize the whole team” when you start over the holidays
Apple collapses with a holiday tradition: the company Announced at the beginning of last month that its app store will continue to review developer submissions over the holidays, welcome news for app developers approaching their busiest season.
Previously, an app that had to release a bug fix or critical update on Black Friday or in the last few hours of Christmas shopping couldn’t fix it for days. This year, December 23-27, App Store Connect’s service staff will be working on a reduced schedule, which means updates will be done, but the checks “may take longer,” the company said.
On the surface, this looks like a complete win for app developers and their customers, but an expert we spoke to warned that some developers could face unintended consequences if they don’t adapt to recent changes.
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For the sake of clarity, we interviewed two people whose agencies support companies with their mobile apps: Wolfpack Digital CEO Georgina Lupu Florian and starteris Jamie Shostak we recently interviewed According to our Survey to identify the best software consultants for startups. For reasons of balance, we also spoke to Yasser Bashir, co-founder of the software development company Arbisoft.
Florian and Shostak both said they see the change as mostly positive, they told TechCrunch. “This is amazing news for our customers,” said Shostak. But Lupu Florian warns: “We believe that this can also cause difficulties for some companies and developers if it is not properly understood and managed.”
The end of the headache
According to Shostak, Apple’s policies have “definitely been a challenge” to their customers over the past few years. Knowing that App Store Connect wouldn’t accept updates or reprints always influenced year-end planning, he said. “In general, teams would have to sprint to finish earlier or plan for minor updates.”
“Instead of trying to force as many features as possible before the holidays,” says Lupu Florian, “we focused on the most important ones and tried to finish them first and spend more time on quality assurance and testing. This gave us more time to solve potential problems before they even went into production. “
