Even if he did, the problem here is canned answers. Not getting any specifics of what you should correct is a nightmare. It’s like a stupid escape game where you can’t win.
They can say it’s in the description but not what specifically? Wtf kind of crappy support tool do they use that they can’t customize canned replies?
“Fun fact”: mentioning pre-release software is actually very much allowed by the App Store guidelines, and has been for several years. The App Store reviewers themselves have failed to keep up with the developer program license agreement changing and removing the “you can’t talk about beta software” bit. As an app developer it’s hilarious that we have to keep better track of that agreement than they are willing to but sadly kind of expected at this point.
It’s not the guidelines specifically, beyond the fact that you must follow the developer program agreement, which is the actual thing they’ll ding you for. See this thread for sample rejection verbiage and why it is invalid: https://twitter.com/_saagarjha/status/1438603898999083028
The little experience I had with AppStore approval is that it’s mostly a game of persistence. They probably see some benefit from a little friction to prevent spam or perhaps it’s just pure stupid bureaucracy.
I was rejected for asking access to the camera. The App applied filters to images taken. I stated as much in XCode, something along: this app needs access to the camera in order to apply its effects. Rejected for not being clear enough. I reworded, basically adding more cruft: accepted.
I doubt the second version was clearer, in fact, it probably wasn’t. It feels much more like a test to see how much does this account want/need to publish and are willing to cooperate, than actually following rules that make any sense.
You also need to have a little understanding. It's never going to be a perfect process when you have people who aren't technical making sometimes subjective decisions.
The trick is to plan well. Assume delays and the need for re-reviews and don't tie anything to when you think it might be approved.
> Assume delays and the need for re-reviews and don't tie anything to when you think it might be approved.
This also, you know, sucks majorly when planning anything. If Apple had to deal with this kind of review when releasing iPhone they’d put a billion dollars into lobbying it away.
I am aware. You can submit prototype devices to those companies. There are clear standards to meet and established ways to escalate or appeal reviews when necessary. You know, like a functional process.
After being an iOS dev for 10 years now, I would gladly deal with the franchise tax board over apple App Store review. Government regulations are set out to the be followed to the letter of the law. App Store guidelines can be tossed aside because a reviewer didn’t like your tone. I’ve had at least two dozen App Store rejections that were magically approved the second I mentioned going to the press about discrimination.
One of the main points of the App Store is for curating quality, and I'm sure there is some positive correlation between quality and persistence, but like any one-size-fits-all policy, it will have failure around the edge cases (persistent spammers and non-persistent but quality software publishers).
> I literally haven’t changed the text in my marketing description in many months.
After 5 years in the App Store, and having my app featured in the Accessibility section, we were flagged for a characteristic that had remained unchanged since launch. In almost every case, our rejections were not related to newly-added features.
This was for unrelated feature upgrades. I suppose it’s possible people had flagged us and the flags weren’t reviewed until we submitted an update though.
Why is Apple so hard on small developers with incredible scrutiny on releases and sometimes seemingly arbitrary eval criteria, and Tik Tok can run rampant with a keylogger injected with JavaScript? Genuinely asking in good faith here as this is way out of my domain of expertise. I worked as a UI/UX designer for a company that shipped iOS and Android games exclusively and they (Apple App Store reviewers) were always hard on us for every little thing we published. But it seems like the major social apps have some seriously invasive tech bundled in and I have to imagine if JoeBlowApp LLC wanted to ship an app with the level of data collection that Tik Tok has, they'd get reamed by Apple, no?
This is the most annoying part of rejection. They won’t point to anything specifically, but continue to send vague summaries of the issue. If you’re staring at a plist file and there’s an issue, why not just tell me you found an issue with the plist? It’s infuriating.
I understand the mistake that led to the rejection. The arrogant, obnoxious, unhelpful, and entitled way the mistake was handled is what’s infuriating.
That's just Apple being Apple. It's also one of the reasons I don't use their products despite how nice they look. They always think they're right, and smugly so. "You're holding it wrong", etc. The attitude is endemic.
100%, and sadly I've had quite a few high-friction conversations with friends about iMessage. It's endemic and trickles down to some of their customers, too.
I've had a few rejections (not "dozens," as someone above mentioned), and, in my case, I have had to often deal with the vague, "canned" responses, but also, a couple of times, I actually had detailed indications, including screenshots.
I am always unfailingly polite and professional, even though I may want to strangle them.
I dunno. I consider this "the cost of doing business." Not thrilled with it, but it's better than friends of mine have had to deal with, when a couple of thugs walk into their new restaurant, and say "Where ya want the video games set up?"
Recently it took me 7 re-submissions to get an app through app review. The reason? I was using a third-party SDK! One reviewer figured that the SDK is contained in the app and this means it counts as content. And any third-party content requires a written and signed agreement with me personally which for an open source code from github I obviously didn't have. I was trying to explain the situation but each consecutive reviewer was just copying and pasting the same rejection.
The process is just so broken.
Getting rejected on Google Play sucks, but at least you can still sideload apps while you dispute it. Getting rejected by Apple should be illegal until they provide a way to use an alternative app store.
For example I almost never use apps outside of the App Store and brew.
It's great to be able have updates and purchases managed in one place and if I ever get a new computer I can simply login to my account and re-download everything in seconds.
TL;DR Apple re-used the term "Continuity Camera", which now applies to both a preexisting feature from iOS 12 and a prerelease feature in iOS 16. The app's description refers to the preexisting feature, but app review metadata-rejected the app anyway.
Also, app review initially neglected to mention the specific problem, instead simply hand-waving about the rule against mentioning prerelease features.
What I find interesting is that we seem to perceive the App Store Review process as some kind of black and white thing, while it isn't. Like a pure function that only works with the input variables provided and no side effects. Guess what, there is an actual human on the other side that is reviewing your app (with support of automation tools obviously). That person will make mistakes, will bring his/her own opinion and might not be consistent and often won't be very elaborate. Kind of refreshing actually.
Interestingly, that's probably how most customers are handled by many of the submitted apps, if at all.
No, it's a distopian fucking horrorshow. You're right, of course. Humans are involved, it's not consistent, you're witnessing a state machine where 'opinion and carefulness of the human(s) that are part of this process' is a significant chunk of how it works.
But, __the escalation features__ are clichéd Catch-22-esque lunacy, and the actual information you receive in order to ascertain which part of the big state machine caused the rejection is non-existent.
If this was how a government worked, I'd expect literal "shoot a leader in broad daylight and storm their palace" levels of unrest in a week.
Apple (and other corps) are perfectly capable of reasoning beyond the almighty dollar. Tim Cook did it, presumably, in a rather famous incident yelling down someone on the earnings call questioning apple's decision to spend extra cash on environmentally friendlier packaging and distribution processes. Possibly Tim really is a short sighted moron who just thinks its worth wasting money on the environment ('wasting money' in the sense of the amoral stockholder only, of course!), but I'm assuming someone of Tim's caliber is a bit more intelligent than that, and Tim's thought through the (potential) brand damage, let alone the benefits of exuding an imagine of being environmentally friendlier than needed. Which isn't just "brand", but also staving off government intervention.
So, given that Tim and co are presumably capable of thinking through the repercussions of how the company operates, are they truly making the call that causing people the kind of pain and frustration that makes posts like this rise to the top of hackernews is somehow 'worth it', or are they, at least in this highly specific regard, short-sighted morons / dangerously uninformed about how their own company's processes work?
I just do not understand. Whatever it costs to stop pissing off and chasing away developers for your platform whilst arming the masses to demand regulatory intervention HAS to be worth it. And if Apple and co can't see that, I say; Heck yeah. Bring on the fucking regulators. I know and accept it'll suck and they'll make a hash of it, but odds are good it won't be such a shitshow as what app review is today, and examples need to be made.
If Apple makes you this unhinged then don't buy their products and avoid reading anything about them.
Because these posts have been here for over a decade and will be here for decades to come. Because the App Store is not about developers. It's about users. And being a human-curated process there will often be mistakes and people on Twitter complaining. But users really like curation and so the status quo is very much likely to remain.
"Guess what, there is an actual human on the other side that is reviewing your app (with support of automation tools obviously). That person will make mistakes…"
Those mistakes work both ways. Sometimes apps are approved that shouldn't have received approval.
Yes but it’s incredibly concerning that greater scrutiny isn’t being paid to apps at the top of the charts. What are their priorities if they’re going after cases like the OP?
Me not buying their products doesn't stop my users from doing so, or my employer from demanding we support them. Also you've clearly never been on the submitting side of the app store, this "careful curation" often misses blatant violations and instead nags for weeks on minor or non-existent issues while refusing to elaborate.
> That person will make mistakes, will bring his/her own opinion and might not be consistent and often won't be very elaborate.
That's fine, but anything coming out from Apple (including the reasonable mistakes) are treated as the word of God, so correcting those mistakes are more difficult than they should be.
Isn’t this only a good thing if the human being on the other end makes reasonable decisions in the interest of (1) the App Store and (2) iOS developers?
I understand I am biased by only seeing stories from developers who have issues getting apps approved, but these stories rarely end with a reasonable outcome.
Of course not, and we know this. However we also don't hear all the horror stories.
Secondly, if this was expected and reasonable then I would be hearing about all the painful rejections from the Android store.
In the same manner I would expect to see all the complaints about AWS shuttering people's accounts with no recourse given in the same way that Google kills people's accounts. Or Genius Bar staff having to go to the toilet in bottles because Apple doesn't give them breaks.
Sometimes companies are shitty to their customers and employees, and they can do this in different ways. It doesn't mean we shouldn't point them out in the hopes that they are recognised and improved upon.
I find it funny (no, not funny, tragic) how alledgedly the most efficient companies around can go down to Aristotzkian levels of bureaucratic gaslighting.
I'm about to release my first iOS app, and all of these posts of late are making me nervous.
Does anyone have a good link to a guide for dealing with the App Store reviewers' capriciousness? Or is it simply a roll of the dice, no matter how closely one follows the Apple documentation?
Do you really wanna pay for the privilege of going through all of this? Do yourself a favor and just leave it at a web app. That way you can still keep your creative freedom.
I've built the whole thing with web-first technology (Elm + Capacitor) and it's cross-platform already - but distributing it as a native mobile app is part of a larger branding strategy to cement my position in an underserved niche as a purveyor of fine software products.
Future apps that I have plans for will need to take advantage of hardware-specific features; I see this as a foot in the door.
But if I can't get it in, I'll just market the webapp and pivot my strategy for future products.
Maybe there are two teams at Apple both working on a different feature with the same name but they never know because they still can’t talk to eachother about it? ;)
So the follower of Apple are living in literally a Paranoia TRPG world?
"Good morning-cycle citizen. Your publication contains REDACTED which you have to remove because you are not allowed to mention it in your security clearance. Good day-cycle."
I haven't had to deal with Apple's reviewers much personally, but I've watched in amazement as my colleagues wade through the process. Sometimes reviewers get stuck in loops, repeatedly flagging "issues" (misunderstandings) that were already resolved earlier in the conversation. It's like talking to a chat bot with no conversational memory; I guess maybe because it's actually a different person on the other end each time?
The most successful strategy I've seen so far is to summarise the entire conversation so far in every single message you send.
I've also found, like other commenters in this thread, that we are now much better versed in Apple's rules than their own reviewers. So it can help to include quotes from their rules in the conversation summary.
Such stories have been posted at regular intervals for as long as I have been reading this site. It seems to be the reality of publishing on app store.
In which case, Apple is funding a bad PR campaign against themselves.
> Long story short: Two features (one from iOS 12, one from iOS 16), and one name: Continuity Camera.
https://twitter.com/eternalstorms/status/1560304401922854920...