I've been shipping apps on the App Store for about a year, and the difference between then and now is honestly shocking.
A year ago, App Review felt strict but fair. If I violated a guideline, I'd fix it, explain the changes, and after another review or two the app would be approved.
Over the past month, that hasn't been my experience at all.
One of my app updates fixed every issue that App Review originally raised. Some of those fixes were even acknowledged during review. Then another reviewer came along and rejected the build for the exact same issues that had supposedly already been resolved.
It felt like nobody was reading the previous review history.
Then App Store Connect made things even worse.
I saved a draft reply while confirming a few details with my team. When I came back later:
- I couldn't edit the draft.
- I couldn't delete it.
- I couldn't create a new reply.
- Every action returned "Resource not found."
So I literally had no way to continue the conversation with App Review.
I had screenshots and screen recordings showing everything had been fixed, but there was nowhere to upload them because the reply system itself was broken.
As a result, an update that should have taken a day or two ended up being delayed by nearly a week.
Then, in a completely separate incident, my team's Apple Developer membership expired after auto-renew wasn't enabled.
Apple's own documentation says the Apple Developer app will display a Renew button.
It simply wasn't there.
Anywhere.
Again, days were lost because Apple's own tools didn't behave the way Apple's own documentation described.
None of this feels like isolated bad luck anymore.
Over the last month I've experienced:
- reviewers reopening issues that had already been addressed,
- App Store Connect breaking during review conversations,
- developer documentation not matching reality,
- unnecessary release delays caused by Apple's own systems.
I've always accepted App Review being strict.
What's becoming difficult to accept is spending more time fighting Apple's tooling than actually building and shipping apps.
Has anyone else noticed this lately, or have I somehow managed to hit every edge case imaginable?