Another holiday season is rolling in. As you either avoid or join the crowds jumping from mall to mall on holiday shopping sprees, Apple is going to let the App Store review team take a break to do the same. Rumor has it that the review team is incredibly small for one that handles a huge pile of hundreds of thousands of cases every month. After their hard work all year round, they deserve a break for the holidays!

To prepare for the busiest season on the App Store, you should submit your app through iTunes Connect well in advance of their holiday shutdown from December 23 to 27 (Pacific Time). That means new app and app update submissions will not be processed during this time. If you plan on bug scrubbing or integrating new SDKs, hurry up and make sure your release is submitted, approved, and scheduled beforehand.

The queue of update submissions is always longer this time of year, so as a rule of thumb, you should start submitting yours at least three weeks before the shutdown time. This means now. You don’t want your app users to get stuck with a mediocre app version throughout the winter holidays.

Other iTunes Connect functionalities such as My Apps and App Analytics and so on will not be affected during this shutdown period.