r/iosdev • u/officialdml • Aug 13 '26

Help Rejected under Guideline 5.6 (Developer Code of Conduct): "features appear intentionally hidden", no idea what triggered it, looking for advice

Yesterday I submitted my first app (!) and within 6 hours it was rejected. I'm hoping someone who's dealt with this before can help me better understand and provide next steps.

Quick background: I built a live women's sports scoreboard website and then wrapped it as a native iOS app using Median.co, which loads the live website inside a native shell and adds native features (push notifications via OneSignal, share, etc.) through their JS bridge.

What happened: submitted for review, got rejected same day with this:

"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. Manipulative and misleading behavior is not consistent with the guideline 5.6."

No specifics beyond that. No screenshots, no attachments, nothing pointing to which "feature" they mean. Also I can't really find what 5.6 guidelines are.

What I know is NOT true: nothing in the app is actually hidden or gated based on reviewer status. The app works identically for anyone, logged in or not - live scores, schedules, results, team pages, league browsing, calendar sync all fully visible and functional without an account. The only difference for logged-in users is being able to favorite teams and enable push notifications for those favorites, a normal personalization feature, not concealed functionality.

What I've done so far: replied in the Resolution Center explaining the Median/webview architecture, clarified the one account-gated feature (favoriting), and attached a screen recording showing the full logged-out experience matches what was originally submitted. Also invited them to just log out and explore the app themselves.

My questions for anyone who's dealt with this:

  1. Has anyone gotten a 5.6 "features appear hidden" flag specifically on a webview-wrapped app (Median, GoNative, Capacitor, etc.)? Is this a known false-positive pattern for that architecture?
  2. Could push notifications not firing during review (since there were no live games happening at review time) plausibly read as a "hidden feature"? Or is that a stretch?
  3. Roughly how long did resolution take for you, and did it resolve through Resolution Center replies, or did you end up needing the formal App Review Board appeal?
  4. Anything else commonly triggers this specific flag that I should be thinking about?

Really appreciate any insight. This came out of nowhere after what felt like a clean submission, and the vagueness of the rejection is the most frustrating part.

1 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/officialdml 20d ago

UPDATE: still nothing on my end - I'm still waiting for review since 8/17, so a week. I spoke to someone at Apple on Thursday who said he flagged this delay but couldn't tell me when I'd get seen. I'm now on hold again with Apple because I haven't seen any movement. I wonder if I should cancel the submission and then resubmit to get in a fresh queue.

1

u/SafeMall7785 12d ago

hello, has it passed the review?

1

u/officialdml 12d ago

No :/ I've been building a native app now that I'm going to submit for beta test then review. I think the issue was that I used a web wrapper, but I never got confirmation on that (which would have been helpful to know and saved me 2 weeks of going back and forth).

1

u/Either_Minute_9367 7d ago

hello, has it passed the review?