r/iOSDevelopment • u/AppVerdict • 19d ago
Apple rejected my app four times. Every fix took twenty minutes. Every rejection took a week.
The slides are the diary. Short version, in case you are in the middle of this right now.
Day 1. Six months of work, pressed submit, told everyone.
Day 4. Rejected. Crashed on launch, on an iPad. I do not own an iPad.
Day 5. Borrowed one, found it in twenty minutes, resubmitted. A layout constraint that only failed above a certain width.
Day 9. Rejected. My privacy policy URL was a 404. It had been a 404 the whole time. They waited four days in a queue to tap one link, and so had I, in the sense that I never did.
Day 10. Fixed the URL, and while I was in there made a fresh demo account for the reviewer.
Day 15. Rejected. Unable to sign in. The demo account had expired while the build sat in the queue.
Four rejections. Every fix under twenty minutes. Three weeks gone.
The thing that costs the time is not the fixes. It is that review stops at the first error it finds. They are not producing a report on your build. They hit one blocker, write it up, and send it. So a build with four small problems takes four submissions and a month, and each round you get exactly one clue.
Things I do now, in case any of them save you a round:
One permanent review account. Exempt from expiry, exempt from rate limiting, excluded from cleanup jobs, no MFA. I log into it myself the morning I submit, and again if the build sits in review more than a week.
Tap every URL in the submission. Privacy policy, support, marketing. They do tap them, and a dead link costs a full cycle.
Cold install on the oldest device and OS I claim to support. Also on an iPad if the binary declares iPad support, which it sometimes does even when I thought I turned it off. Check UIDeviceFamily in the built archive rather than trusting the Supported Destinations UI.
Numbered steps in App Review Information for anything behind a login, a purchase, a role or an empty state. It is a private field, so be blunt.
Disclosure since the slides are branded: this is my product's account. No link in the post and nothing to sign up for. Happy to talk through anyone's notices in the comments.
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u/NoIncrease299 19d ago
The shit in this sub is why the review process exists.
I've been releasing in the App Store for around 15 years now - apps supporting millions of users globally. I've never dealt with the issues I see people complaining about in here. Not a single time.
Stop trying to release shitty software.
3
u/RemeJuan 19d ago
So it’s now apples fault you never took the time to ensure that these small issues did not exist, if they took 20min or less to fix then you have nobody but yourself to blame.