App Devs Bereft During Holiday Boom: iTunes Connect to Go Down
Later this month, iPhone and iPod application developers can expect to see sales drastically increase by as much as 300 or 400 percent over the course of a couple days.
They'll also be unable to change their applications, change marketing materials or download sales reports during much of this time. iTunes Connect, the interface that allows developers to manage all their applications in the App Store, will be unavailable from December 23 - December 28, 2009.
The same downtime occurred last year and caused some consternation within the developer community.
"I guess iTunes Connect [team members] want a break too," wrote one developer, "but come on, closed for the holidays when people have a lot of time on their hands to buy apps ?"
Another dev shop, Bottle Rocket, wrote, "Apple is taking the next 4 days off. Good for them. So, should we take the hint and lower the shades on Bottle Rocket for at least a few days? The answer is, well, no comment."
Here's a graph showing the kind of traffic and sales pattern app developers can expect to see right around Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and the ensuing week or so. This is a visualization of data from iPod Touch devices last December:
So, once again, during what may be some app developers' biggest sales spike of the entire year, they will not have access to information on sales performance or other metrics, and they won't be able to tweak their marketing materials or create new incentives as the year's biggest gift-giving holiday approaches.
In the interest of maintaining our holiday spirit, we will refrain from comment on whether or not this is a lame move and instead caution our application developer friends to get their ducks in a row before iTunes Connect is out of commission.
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Last year during the Apple Christmas break, iTunes had some major conniptions. I offered a sale price on my App over Christmas, but as soon as I restored the normal price iTunes stopped serving the app altogether, and I was showered with user complaints asking why they could see the app in the store but not download it. Other devs were also affected. Not a peep from Apple until over a week later, well after the break, when all they said was "the problem is now resolved". But I had suffered significant sales losses.
I don't know if anyone else is aware but iTunes also has some major problems right now. Many users are trying to download app updates which were notified to them, and finding that they are receiving OLD versions of the app. For one of my own apps, users were later supplied with new versions of the app which were not compatible with their older OS version, and hence the app could do nothing but crash on startup. (See ajnaware.wordpress.com for more details.)
Frankly I am surprised, in light of these past and ongoing issues that Apple feels they can afford to take time off.
What a pack of complainers...
How about you enjoy Christmas for a few days...
Waiting with baited breath to see if your predictions are right! I wonder how much manual processing they have to do in order to shut down.
Also, hoping they role out a suite of analytics that would actually help developers manage their business rather than having to resort to 3rd party software.
I wonder how many iphone developer were affected by this. Probably a ton. Its great to know that app sales are booming though this will only help encourage more developers to focus on the iphone, because developers go where the money is and right now its with the iphone.