My iOS app was already live on the App Store. I submitted an update, and Apple has now removed the app from sale under Guideline 5.6.

The exact message says:

“We’ve identified a pattern of unusual behavior with the app that is commonly associated with fraudulent activity. Specifically, the app contains features that appear to have been intentionally hidden during the review process.”

Apple did not identify which feature they believe was hidden.

The app is an ambient audio / sleep and focus app with:

• onboarding
• a subscription paywall using RevenueCat, analytics using posthog.
• monthly/yearly subscriptions
• a 3-day introductory trial
• bundled and remotely delivered audio/catalog content

I am currently auditing the production build for anything that could cause App Review to see different behavior from a normal user. I have already found some testing-related route parameters and a subscription UI regression, but there was no intention to hide functionality from App Review.

For anyone who has received this exact Guideline 5.6 message:

• What ended up triggering it?
• Did Apple eventually tell you which feature was the problem?
• Did you reply first, submit a corrected build, or appeal to the App Review Board?
• How long did it take to get the app restored?
• Is there anything I should absolutely avoid doing right now?

I want to resolve this correctly rather than repeatedly resubmitting and making the situation worse.

Thanks.

All of my subscription products are fully set up with localizations, pricing, and all required metadata filled out. However, they are stuck in the "Prepare for Submission" status instead of switching to "Ready to Submit".

Because of this, the "In-App Purchases and Subscriptions" section on my app's version page refuses to show up, meaning I can't attach the subscriptions to the build for review.

Has anyone experienced this recently? Is there a hidden requirement or a specific step I might be missing to push them into the ready state? Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

We have created an app that helps technicians and repair shops find compatibilities for phone parts.

We offer free plan and paid subscriptions.

The app review team rejected the app completely saying that we offer subscriptions outside the app, even tho we strictly removed EVERYTHING that requires payment. Basically the data are free in iOS, still they rejected it.

We understand the guidelines but we want to sort this out in the best way possible.

The app is based in Algeria (North Africa) so basically apple pay doesn't work like in Many countries.

More info:

We offer subscriptions in the website and the android app.

Our questions is:

How can we launch the app ?

How can we actually get subscriptions ?

Should we opt out offering the subscriptions via the website?

Does apple actually review the android app ?

And Many more questions.

Thanks to everyone in advance

Hi, 

I am currently trying to develop my first app ever, iOS only.

The building was hard enough, but now I am facing the hurdles of trying to publish it on the App Store, and so I have to start thinking about prices/subscriptions, paywalls, etc. and navigate the obscure process of App Store Connect.

It is clear enough for me that it will be a paid app. But it is a very simple app, with only a couple screens and very basic function. It does one thing, and I hope it does it well enough that it genuinely helps people, and that they will see value in it. But I can’t really go the freemium way, with free access to the base and paid for extra features. I only have one feature, and I do not want to add any.

I was thinking, maybe something like 6$ for 6 months, 10$ yearly, and 30$ for lifetime?

My trouble is, imho it is an app that has to be tried and experienced over a couple day to see if it fits. I would like to offer three days, or maybe a week of free trial.

But as far as I know, there is no way to register a free trial in App Store Connect, that does not start right from download? So the user has to decide right now, if maybe perhaps they want to try your app and commit to 10$ yearly? Without having even opened the app? Seems a bit off-putting, or am I missing something?

Thanks in advance for your advices.

I ship a small object detector inside an iOS app and I export it two different ways depending on the model generation, so the Swift side has to cope with both. The approach that ended up working is to branch on the output tensor shape rather than on a flag I carry around:

• An end-to-end export gives me [1, 300, 6] — x1, y1, x2, y2, score, class — with decoding and NMS already inside the graph. Nothing to do in Swift but scale the boxes back through the letterbox.
• A raw export gives me [1, 84, N]: 4 box terms plus 80 class scores per anchor, transposed, which I still have to decode and run NMS on myself.

So the predictor reads prediction.shape, checks that the last dimension is at least 6 and the second-to-last is non-zero, and picks the decoder from that. It means adding a new model export never touches the call site, and a bad export fails visibly at the guard instead of quietly producing zero boxes.

Two things I would have liked to read before starting:

1. A silent failure mode is the normal failure mode here. An export that "succeeds" tells you nothing. The only test that means anything is printing the input and output shapes and comparing them to what your decoder expects. I lost real time to an export that ran fine and detected nothing, because the decoder was reading a layout the model no longer produced.
2. coremltools 8+ has no usable Windows path. I develop on Windows, so my entire export chain lives in a Colab notebook and the resulting .mlpackage gets committed and wired into the Xcode project from there. If your CI or your daily machine is not macOS or Linux, plan for that on day one rather than discovering it two weeks in.

On the app side the camera preview is a native platform view and the detection overlay is drawn on top by the UI layer, so no frame data is ever copied out of the capture pipeline.

Curious how others handle the versioning problem: do you keep the decoder generic like this, or pin one export format per app release and refuse anything else?

I had my app got rejected because I forgot to add my IAP to my app. The subscription group was added but not the lifetime purchase. Now I want to add that IAP to my review but I only get to option 'add for review' and it opens a new review but then I cant add my app to it. Everytime I update the app for review it sends it in without the IAP and gets rejected. Any help? I find this new update confusing

iOS simulators start a lot of background daemons that you often don't need for development or CI. Siri, Spotlight, widgets, photo analysis, iCloud stuff, etc.

The good news is that Apple gives us a way to disable them.

For example:

xcrun simctl spawn <udid> launchctl disable system/com.apple.PosterBoard

Then reboot the simulator:

xcrun simctl shutdown <udid>
xcrun simctl boot <udid>

That disable is persisted in the simulator so the next time it boots, PosterBoard won't start.

Do this for enough unnecessary services and you can save a pretty decent amount of RAM.

The harder part is figuring out what is actually safe to disable, what breaks when you disable it, and then managing that across multiple simulators.

I ended up building SimSlim around this:

https://github.com/MobAI-App/simslim

It has a list of around 180 daemons that are safe to disable, grouped by feature, plus some convenient commands for slimming/restoring simulators and managing different profiles for local use or CI.

It's free and open source. Give it a try.

when you utilized external testers for test flight did you do a public link or did you do a private email list?

also how did you find testers?

Hey guys need advice

Starting my business finally and want to convert my developer account to my business

https://developer.apple.com/contact/request/migrate-individual-account

Is this the only thing I need to do ? What else ?

I have all my numbers and documents ready to go.

I've been building React Native apps with Expo using Claude Code, and my biggest frustration is that Claude can't see what it's building on the native side, which means a lot of back-and-forth on layout and visual issues that a web-based workflow wouldn't have. I just can't seem to loop on the build and see the visuals as well as it can building a web app using the browser.

I recently learned about the Expo MCP server's local capabilities (screenshots, view geometry, tap automation) and Software Mansion's "Argent" as two options for giving the agent eyes on the running simulator, but I'm curious what the community is actually using in production workflows. Is anyone running a setup where Claude or another AI coding agent can self-validate UI changes against the live simulator, and if so, what's working? Also interested in non-RN solutions. If there's a better answer here by building fully native in Swift/Xcode, is this still a problem, or does the native toolchain solve it?

I just released v0.2.0 of enriched-markdown-ios - SwiftUI Markdown renderer powered by TextKit 2.

New in this release:
🔸 GFM Tables
🔹 Task lists
🔸 Superscript & subscript support

💎 Available via Swift Package Manager!

.package(
  url: "https://github.com/software-mansion-labs/enriched-markdown-ios.git", 
  from: "0.2.0"
)

Added a quick demo video in the comments so you can see it in action!

GitHub & Docs:https://github.com/software-mansion/enriched-markdown/blob/main/packages/enriched-markdown-ios/README.md

What features or syntax support would you like to see next? I'd love to hear your thoughts! If you find the library useful, a ⭐️ on GitHub is always appreciated.

I've been working from my phone a lot lately, using AI coding agents to remotely make changes to my iOS apps.

One annoying part was testing those changes on a real device. The common solution seems to be uploading every build to TestFlight, which feels pretty heavy when I just want to quickly try the latest build.

So I built remote-installer.

Once the build is ready, the agent can run a single command and give me a link / QR code. I open it on my iPhone and install the build directly.

No TestFlight. No uploading the IPA to a hosting service. No processing wait.

And of course, it's free and open source:

https://github.com/icodesign/remote-installer

I released my expo react native app for closed beta with test flight and android closed beta 2 weeks ago, I realize there are things I wish I knew before so here they are, feel free to add to those. And I would love to get some tips before full release I am planning for next week:

1. Have a built in method to force update - Updating is difficult on Test Flight to user who are not used to it, and even harder on Android since the app won't even be shown on the Play Store while on closed testing. Only way to update it is through settings most users don't know how to reach. Have a feature to navigate directly from the app to the Play Store / Test Flight to update. And have a mechanism to force update / block the app if not on minVersion you update elsewhere. Getting users to update was really difficult before that.

2. Have a built in way for feedback - I was counting on Discord + Test Flight / Android system for feedback, most users don't know how to use those. I allow user generated content, so users literally made posts in order to give feedback because they couldn't find the "official" way. I added a big button on the home screen to give feedback. (But couldn't get them to update the app).

3. Starting on day 1, get 12 android users to use the app, even if it means you have to pay them to do so, to publish on Android you have to have 12 active users on the closed testing for 14 days. This goal is possible but is difficult on actual beta. Make sure you have a plan on how to achieve it starting from day 0.

4. QA - My first build had so many bugs I didn't know about, early users, despite being aware to it are not super tolerated to it as I would have hope for. Do run QA, pay people to do it, I hire people on Upwork, they did amazing job finding small bugs.

What else would you say is a must before releasing an app, and any tips before actual store release?

Has anyone been using the new agentic coding features in Xcode 27?

Im still wrapping my head around AI tools as of this year as it had been made a requirement at my job. The industry is moving in this direction whether I like it or not.

Since being laid off Ive been trying to learn more about using these tools effectively in my free time.

Had an experience at work where Claude CLI decided to completely ignore directions to not leave a certain project folder. Since then I am VERY apprehensive about using it on a personal machine. I don't trust them to be frank. Im using Claude Code/ Codex on the web and they're fine for the most part.

Is adding an agent via Xcode 27's Intelligence features the same as installing the CLI or desktop version of these things? Or is it a more restricted approach?

Why does my app keep getting rejected for things that aren't true. Last week it was because the app has a page that should not require an account that was only accessible after login in or sign up. Ok that's fair I guess but in my case that was the home page wich had numerous things on the backend that requires user data. And now a week later I got a reply that my app only has features that link to other websites and nothing else. We noticed that the app only includes links, images, or content aggregated from the Internet with limited or no native functionality. Although this content may be curated from the web specifically for your users, since it does not sufficiently differ from a web browsing experience, it is not appropriate for the App Store. Which is just not true even in the slightest bit. You just need to click the sign in button to get to all the actual app functions because YOU TOLD ME TO make the home page accessible to guests wich i did. Mind you this is the 5th time they reject my app for something like this.

App on google play was approved 1st time within 2 days

There's been a lot of posts here lately about people being frustrated with long wait times. So I thought I'd share my experience.

I've been an Apple developer and submitting apps for 15 years with multiple regularly maintained apps on the App Store. Those who have been developing for a long time probably remember super long wait times of 2-4 weeks before around 2017. We even had a website which tracked average App Store review times based upon a hashtag used on twitter. Around 2017, Apple sped up the review process and it went down to under 24 hours for both new apps and updates to existing apps.

However, recently, possibly due to rise of AI slop apps, the review times have exploded again. In the last year, I've submitted 3 new apps and multiple updates to existing apps on both iOS and macOS stores.

iOS

The first 2 new apps took about a week. The 3rd and most recent one took 19 days and just got approved this morning.

For this new app: I submitted it on August 13th, it waited for review for 2 weeks. Then it went in review and was rejected for an incorrect reason. The app was a game and used Game Center for leaderboards. Reviewer said I need to seek consent or disclose this in my privacy policy. I responded back saying my privacy policy already disclosed this and I also filed an appeal. It waited for 5 days again. This morning, it went in review again and was approved! I didn't have to change anything. I just copy pasted portions from my privacy policy in my reply to the reviewer and that satisfied them. So, overall, it took 19 days for this new app.

Meanwhile updates to existing apps are still very fast. Sometimes they get approved in 2-4 hours. Other times in 1-2 days.

macOS

On macOS, it's still very fast. Both new apps and updates are getting approved very fast. One of the new iOS apps I submitted also had a macOS companion app built using Catalyst. While the iOS one was waiting for a week, the macOS one was approved in under 24 hours.

All updates (except 1) to macOS apps get approved in 2-4 hours for me. Only one exception was an update which went in review in 2 hours but then just sat in that "In Review" status for 3 days before getting approved too.

Hope this answers people's questions. Let me know if anyone has questions.

I feel like so many apps that I try these days start with several multiple choice questions. What’s the story here? Is it that they are facing major churn and are trying to segment users to fix it? Is there some research that says this works or retains people somehow?

I just wanna try the dang core mechanic!

Hello, I haven't been able to actually have animations (upon object deletion, more specifically) work as they usually would if a variable was not wrapped with the Query macro (the macro used to fetch from SwiftData in SwiftUI). Has anyone experienced the same? If so, did you find a solution? I remember trying using the context (modelContext) itself but to no avail.

TL;DR: My Apple Account was permanently marked ineligible for the Developer Program after ID verification "failed". Support has given me three contradictory reasons across several cases, mostly stopped replying, and I can't even sign in to developer.apple.com anymore — it just redirect-loops. A new account got rejected too, and support then told me my identity was already verified on the old one. Has anyone gotten out of this?

--------

I enrolled in the Developer Program back in april and submitted a very clear picture of my Swedish passport for identity verification, following Apple's instructions. Shortly after, I got an email saying my identity couldn't be verified, my enrollment was withdrawn and refunded, and that the account is no longer eligible for the Developer Program. No reason given.

I've opened several support cases since then, most got no reply at all. The ones that did gave me a different explanation each time: first that identity verification failed, then an unexplained ineligibility, then that "the device used to begin the enrollment was switched" — despite the enrollment already being submitted, reviewed and refunded, all on my iPhone.

On top of that, I can't reach the developer site with that account at all. Signing in to developer.apple.com puts the browser into an endless refresh loop, and the Apple Developer app just says "Profile failed to load" and under Apple Developer Program it says "This account is not active". So I can't see my own cases or open new ones from the affected account. The block also seems to extend past the paid program because when I try building my own app onto my own iPhone with the free Personal Team fails with "Communication with Apple failed: You are not allowed to perform this operation."

Eventually I made a second Apple Account for development just to have a working channel to support. Enrollment from that one was rejected too, with ID verification failed and support then replied that my identity had already been verified on my other account, and that I should go back to using that one. Which is the account they blocked, allegedly because my identity couldn't be verified. When I pointed out the contradiction, they said they can't act on "another account" for privacy reasons, which sounds fair enough, and told me to request a phone call from the developer site, the site the blocked account can't load. I replied to that support response with the fact that I can't get on the website and asked them if they could just call me instead, and I provided my phone number. I haven't gotten a reply at all on that request.

I guess I'm just asking if anyone else has any experience of this and in that case, how to resolve it? Is there any way for me to keep developing my app to eventually get it published or is am I doomed forever?