IPhone & iPad Devs: Christmas is Your Most Important Day | Hacker News Reader

IPhone & iPad Devs: Christmas is Your Most Important Day

ryanspoon.com

23 pointsdell90007 comments

You also can't schedule a sale for Christmas, because if you do, it will make your app unavailable for sale. So much for our "most important day".

Can you elaborate on this for someone not familiar with app store processes?

It's because they are shutting down iTunes Connect (the site through which developers manage their apps on the store) from December 23rd to the 29th. Here is the e-mail I got:

"iTunes Connect will be temporarily shut down from Thursday, December 23 to Tuesday, December 28 for the winter holidays. Access will resume on Wednesday, December 29.

During this shutdown, iTunes Connect will be unavailable. In addition, app releases and pricing changes which are scheduled to take place during the shutdown will be handled as follows:

    * All releases will not appear in the App Store until Wednesday, December 29. This includes apps scheduled to appear on the App Store for the first time as well as updates to existing apps.

    * Pricing changes will cause the app to become unavailable for purchase until Wednesday, December 29, at which point the app will become available at the new price. Please check to ensure you have not scheduled any price changes during this time.

Regards, The iTunes Store team "

And you can't access any of your sales data until iTunes connect reopens after Christmas.

That's okay, leaves more to surprise :)

It would be interesting to see if the "Gift This App" feature gets much use as this will be the first Christmas since the feature was implemented. I have only seen one of my apps gifted so far.

Well, my story is only one data point but I have NEVER gotten the "give as gift" feature to work. I have a US account, and have registered two different credit cards and Paypal but always receive "credit card declined, you must update your account" when trying to gift apps.

So I would welcome the give as gift feature actually working as advertised.

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