Managing Develop and Production APIs

I'm having trouble understanding how to manage develop and production APIs my app leverages. We update a develop server and the new versions of the API will be compatible with a planned release of the application. However, this release is a production release and we need to point it at a production server. Apple needs to approve our release, therefore we have an issue where if we update production before apple approves the build it often breaks for existing users, and if we update after it will break for Apple. I'm currently on a large TestFlight group of about 100 users, we are planning to move out of test flight in a few months. How is this typically handled?