App Store to be locked down over Thanksgiving and Christmas

Apple’s planning on shutting down the App Store during Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. Maybe “shutting down” the App Store isn’t the most appropriate way to explain it. It’s actually going to be more like a content freeze. The news isn’t all that shocking considering Apple has done this in the past, but they have included Thanksgiving weekend for the first time in the practice.

For consumers who are planning to purchase apps during this downtime, the store will remain open. But, if you’re a developer, hoping to make some changes to your application, access iTunes Connect, or do any tip management that requires Apple services, you’ll have to wait until they get back into the office and flick the App Store switch back on again.

In addition to the lockdown, 148 Apps is reporting that Top App listings in the App Store will also be locked down for the duration of the freeze, resulting in the listings remaining the same for the duration of the freeze.

While most of this isn’t news for developers—this happens every year— there is a new twist this year: scheduled price changes. There has been no official announcement from Apple yet about how they plan to handle sales scheduled during the holidays. We assume that they’ll let anything that has been scheduled previous to the freeze be updated as usual, but we’ve been wrong before.

We’ll keep you posted once we hear more on the topic, but if you’re thinking about getting some updates into the App Store during December, you might want to double check your deadline schedule.

Article Via 148 Apps

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.