Once on Newsstand, always on Newsstand

If you are considering whether or not your app should go in the Newsstand category in the Apple App Store, take this into account: Once you’ve published an app in the Newsstand category, there is no going back. Apple documents this here. Specifically, they say "If a Newsstand-enabled app version has the the Ready for Sale status, you cannot disable Newsstand for any current or future versions of that app."

I have a customer that has an app on Newsstand, and now, for business- and marketing-related reasons, they want to remove it from Newsstand. When we discovered that this couldn’t be done in iTunesConnect, I called Apple to see if there was some way that they could override or make this change on their end. The answer was a clear “no”. So it looks like if you have an app on Newsstand, the only way to get the app out of Newsstand is to remove the app from the App Store, and publish an entirely new App. This is a poor solution, since there is no way to “update” users from one app to another.