Submitting iOS App to App Store for Review Without Pushing Server Updates to Production

Question

Our platform is undergoing a major upgrade that amongst other things impact's the database schema and data relationships.

We have updated our apps and are about to submit them to the App Store for approval. We will be submitting the app with the API endpoints pointing to our production environment but the new endpoints will only work once the DB schema of our platform is upgraded which we do not want to do till our app is approved.

Does anyone have an approach on how to proceed? Is there a way to provision the app with staging and production API endpoints, have Apple review on staging endpoints but make the app live with production endpoints?

PS - Due to timing constraints we have not worked on our platform upgrade with backward compatibility so we would be asking our iOS app users to upgrade to the new app once our platform is successfully upgraded.

Answer 1

I have an idea may work for you. Put your new platform in a temporary server. let your app. connect to it only for apple testing. give apple a test user that only connects to the temporary server and all others connects to the live server.

later you can upload a new version that does not include that logic. a x.x.1 version.

remember to select the option saying developer release. means that your app will be accepted but will not get released until you release it manually. this allows you to release the app. and update your platform synchronously.