Apple’s app review process underscores the asymmetry between the world’s most valuable company and small app developers, especially those working solo. When Alin Panaitiu received a rejection notice this year for his app that compiled a list of music festivals in Romania, he was told only that it must create a “lasting experience” to qualify for the App Store. After a frustrating month of speculative modifications and repeated rejections with boilerplate responses, he appealed for help on social media.
A few days after Panaitiu’s post gained traction, his app was approved without explanation. The app was intended to fund his brother’s first year of college, but by the time it appeared on the App Store, the summer festival season had ended. Panaitiu listed it for free.
The appeals process can save an app after it has been rejected, but developers say the most frustrating and time-consuming aspects of Apple’s process appear unchanged. An app can be bogged down by weeks or months of written exchanges with reviewers via Apple’s App Store Connect website before it is formally rejected.
In 2020, Ben Fry saw his company Fathom’s Covid tracker app for institutions rejected for offering medical advice—a function entirely absent from the service. He turned to the appeals process after multiple exchanges with Apple and the app was later approved without changes. Another of Fry’s apps was shot down for not providing enough utility, only to be accepted after an appeal for being “well-designed.”
Fry says his company now actively avoids the App Store and produces web apps instead. “Every experience I’ve had with submitting an app has been a nightmare,” Fry says. “Apple’s involvement is personally frustrating and a huge professional liability.”
Nelson, the London developer, was told that his app breached a guideline aimed at preventing copycats. After he appealed the rejection, a reviewer on the phone refused to tell Nelson which app he was allegedly copying or what features he needed to drop or change. Nelson resorted to a brute force approach, systematically updating nearly every aspect of his game until Apple approved it.
Former members of the App Review team told WIRED that app rejections are vague because Apple’s app guidelines are vague and the company’s working conditions don’t allow or require them to be interpreted consistently.
“We will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line,” the guidelines say. “What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’ And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.” Fry and Panaitiu’s apps both fell foul of the guidelines’ hazy demand that apps provide “some sort of lasting entertainment value or adequate utility.”
In 2020, the former head of the App Store, Phillip Shoemaker, told US lawmakers that Apple’s developer rules were “arbitrary” and used against competitors. In a deposition in the Epic lawsuit, Shoemaker said that the qualifications needed to get hired as an app reviewer were that a person “could breathe [and] could think.”