In 2024, consumers spent $150 billion on in-app purchases, according to the State of Mobile 2025report. And no period drives more of that spending than the holiday season. That means retailers must start preparing now to capture every dollar and deliver a seamless, joyful experience for their customers.

As the festive season approaches, the same ritual unfolds across retail tech teams worldwide: engineering leaders declare a code freeze for the holidays. The reasoning seems sound — lock everything down during the busiest time of year to prevent disruptions to the customer experience when stakes are highest.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: code freezes don’t actually prevent bad experiences. In fact, they can make it harder for teams to respond quickly and effectively when issues inevitably arise.

Why Code Freezes Backfire When you Need Stability Most

For years, our company has helped retailers create profitable shopping experiences via their mobile apps. I’ve watched well-intentioned code freezes collide with reality. A critical security vulnerability drops the week before Black Friday. Apple releases an iOS update that breaks your checkout flow. A payment processor mandates a compliance update with a hard deadline in November. Your app’s crash rate suddenly spikes on certain Android devices.

These aren’t hypothetical scenarios; they happen every year. And when you’ve frozen your deployment pipeline, you’re left with two bad options: ship an emergency fix without your normal quality checks, or leave a broken experience in production during your most valuable weeks of the year.

The retailers that consistently win during peak season have learned a different approach. Instead of freezing code, they’ve built mobile release practices that let them ship essential updates safely, even in the October to January time frame.

Here are the five practices that make the difference.

**1. Automated testing on real devices and networks. **Before any update ships during peak season, it needs to run through comprehensive automated testing, not on simulators, but on actual devices experiencing real network conditions. Your customers aren’t shopping on an iPhone simulator connected to office WiFi; they’re using a three-year-old Android phone on a spotty LTE connection in a crowded mall.

Leading retailers maintain device labs that mirror their actual user base and automate regression testing across critical flows: search, product pages, cart, checkout and order confirmation. This testing runs before every release candidate, catching issues that would otherwise surface only when thousands of customers hit the bug simultaneously on Cyber Monday.

Additionally, adding automation that lets your QA team install your app on test devices remotely (bypassing App Store Connect and Google Play Console), and sharing public links for external testers and private links for internal testing, allows retailers to ensure quality app releases faster.

**2. Feature flags to isolate risk. **Feature flags let you deploy code without immediately exposing it to users. This separation of deployment from release is transformative during peak season. You can ship the security patch or performance improvement you need while keeping any new feature work safely hidden behind a flag until after the holiday rush.

Flags also give you a kill switch. If something does go wrong with a new feature, you can turn it off instantly without rolling back the entire release or waiting for app store approval. The ability to disable a problematic feature in seconds, not days, is invaluable when purchases are flowing at peak rates.

**3. Release gating with quality thresholds. **Not every build that passes functional testing is ready for customers. The most sophisticated mobile teams set quantitative quality gates that must be cleared before a release can proceed: crash-free session rates above 99.5%, app start time under two seconds, checkout completion rates within expected ranges (i.e. lightning-fast).

These thresholds turn subjective “is it ready?” conversations into objective go/no-go decisions. If a build doesn’t meet your quality bar in staged testing, it doesn’t roll out further. Period. This discipline is especially critical during Q4, when the cost of a bad release is measured in millions of dollars per hour.

**4. Phased rollouts and canary releases. **Even with rigorous testing, edge cases emerge when real users interact with your app in ways you didn’t anticipate. Phased rollouts let you expose updates gradually: 1% of users, then 5%, then 25%, watching metrics closely at each stage before proceeding.

This approach gives retailers fast signals about problems while limiting blast radius. If you detect elevated crash rates or conversion drops in your canary group, you can halt the rollout before the issue reaches your full user base. The alternative: a big-bang release to 100% of users that means discovering problems only after they’ve already impacted millions of sessions.

**5. Instant rollback with clear ownership and observability. **Despite all precautions, incidents happen. When they do during peak season, response time determines whether you lose tens of thousands in revenue — or tens of millions. The teams that respond fastest have three things in place:

• Clear ownership: Everyone knows who makes the call to roll back and who executes it; no hunting for decision makers while customers can’t check out.
• Instant rollback capability: The technical ability to revert to the previous version immediately, either through store rollback mechanisms or feature flag toggles.
• Real-time observability: Dashboards showing crash rates, conversion funnels and performance metrics by app version, updated every minute so you detect problems before your customer service queue explodes.

Your Practical Q4 Readiness Checklist

Here’s how to prepare your mobile release capability for peak season:

Six weeks before Black Friday:

• Run a fire drill simulating a critical bug during peak traffic
• Document your hot-fix approval process and ensure all stakeholders know their roles
• Verify that rollback procedures work for both iOS and Android
• Set up on-call rotations with clear escalation paths

Four weeks out:

• Complete any major feature work; begin limiting changes to essential updates only
• Review app store submission timelines (Apple typically takes 24-48 hours, but allow a buffer) or ensure you have the right technology in place to push out hot fixes fast.
• Baseline your quality metrics so you know what “normal” looks like
• Prepare feature flags for any Q4 specific functionality

During peak (Thanksgiving-New Year’s):

• Maintain heightened monitoring with alerts tuned to detect issues faster
• Staff your on-call rotation appropriately for holiday schedules
• Keep hot-fix runbooks accessible to whoever is responding
• Log any technical debt or issues you discover for post-peak cleanup

January recovery:

• Review what updates you deferred and prioritize what to ship
• Conduct a retrospective on any incidents that occurred
• Update runbooks based on what you learned
• Address accumulated technical debt before next peak season planning begins

Agility, Not Paralysis, is your Best Defense for Holiday Shopping Season Success

Retailers have learned this the hard way: freezing code doesn’t stop problems — it just stops you from fixing them at breakneck speed. Security vulnerabilities, platform updates, compliance requirements and production issues don’t care about your freeze window. They’ll happen regardless.

The real question isn’t if you’ll need to update your mobile app during Q4, it’s whether you have the right toolchain and practices in place to do it safely.

Top-performing retailers handle peak season with mobile-first CI/CD pipelines powered by automated testing, quality gates, feature flags, phased rollouts and instant rollback capabilities. These practices let them deliver essential updates, such as security patches, performance boosts and critical bug fixes, without jeopardizing stability or user experience.

This holiday season, while competitors are either stuck in a freeze or taking reckless risks, you can choose a smarter path: move forward deliberately, with confidence that your release process safeguards both your customers and your revenue. Because in retail, Q4 isn’t the time to stand still, it’s the moment when safe, controlled movement matters most.

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Barnabás Birmacher is CEO of Bitrise, where he works with retail technology teams to build resilient mobile release practices that perform under pressure.