What App Review Looks For, as Far as We Know: October 2026

What does Apple’s App Review check, and what is it like to be on the other side of it? As far as the public record shows on October 5, 2026: a team Apple’s own site now sizes at “nearly 500 dedicated experts,” with machine learning alongside it, reviewed 9.1 million submissions in 2025 and rejected 2.09 million of them, nearly one in four; Apple says “On average, 90% of submissions are reviewed in less than 24 hours,” and that “over 40% of unresolved issues are related to guideline 2.1: App Completeness,” the rule about crashes, placeholder content, missing demo access and purchases that aren’t there.¹²³⁴⁵ Nobody outside Apple has published the reviewer’s checklist. What follows is the next best thing: Apple’s own pages and reports, the rejection messages developers have posted, the rule changes of the last fifteen months, and then our own app, Kiradex, walked through all of it against that record, with what we had to fix.

TL;DR

• The numbers Apple publishes. 9.1 million submissions reviewed in 2025, over 2 million rejected (over 1.2 million of them new apps); over 443,000 for privacy, over 371,000 for copying, spam or misleading users, over 22,000 for hidden features. The transparency report puts the Performance section on 1.35 million of the 2.09 million rejections, Legal on 496,000, Design on 416,000, Business on 284,000.³⁴
• One week of percentages, eight years old, still the most recent guideline-level ranking Apple has given. For the week ending April 3, 2018: 2.1 App Completeness 42%, 4.3 Spam 10%, 5.1.1 Privacy 8%, 2.3.3 Accurate Metadata 8%, 5.1.5 Location 5%, 3.1.1 In-App Purchase 5%.⁶
• Reviewers run iPhone apps on iPads, often enough to plan for it. Rejections have named the device: an iPad7,5 crash log in 2022; a developer’s account in May 2026 of fields clearing “on an iPad Air 11-inch (M3) running iPadOS 26.4.2.” Apple’s reply to one developer who argued the point: “all apps designed for use on iPhone must still be formatted correctly and behave properly when running on iPad.”⁷
• The subscription rejection is a form letter, and it was still in use in September 2025. “We were unable to find the following required item(s) in your app’s metadata: – A functional link to the Terms of Use (EULA).” If you use Apple’s standard EULA, the fix is a link in the description.⁸
• The rules moved in 2025 and 2026. Five age tiers (13+, 16+, 18+ added), social-media questions required from September 2026, random or anonymous chat pulled under guideline 1.2, a ban on other developers’ brands in your icon or name, and a submission model where the first in-app purchases and Game Center items of an app have to be added to the same submission as the version.⁹
• Our own pass found eleven things to fix on a listing three people had read. Among them the Terms of Use link, prices in the product names, products and Game Center components that were not in the submission, a trademark in the keywords, and a server log that kept more than the privacy label said. The fixes are in the last section.

Where this comes from, and where it stops

Apple describes App Review in three places on its developer site: the App Review page, the App Review Guidelines (the page prints “Last Updated: June 8, 2026”), and App Store Connect Help; its consumer pages and its documentation add a sentence here and there, quoted below where they do.^121011125 Once a year it adds numbers: a Newsroom release about fraud, each May so far, and the App Store Transparency Report, which counts submissions and rejections by guideline section.³⁴ Rejection messages are not published by Apple, but developers post them, and the same sentences recur for years; the ones below are quoted from those posts with their dates, and they are the developers’ transcriptions, not Apple documents.⁸ What the team is like from the inside comes from court testimony and reporting, in the next section but one.

What this cannot tell you is what the reviewer assigned to your app will do on the day. Apple’s help says “Submissions may not be reviewed in the order you submit them,” and the guidelines say that “if your app is complex or presents new issues, it may require greater scrutiny and consideration.”¹⁰² Treat everything here as the shape of the process, not a promise about one review.

The scale of it

Apple’s May 2026 release says the App Review team “evaluated more than 9.1 million app submissions” in 2025 and “rejected over 2 million app submissions — including over 1.2 million new apps and nearly 800,000 app updates.”³ The transparency report for the same year gives the precise figures: 9,100,620 submissions, 2,093,244 rejected, 387,087 “approved after rejection.”⁴ That is 23.0 percent of submissions rejected, my arithmetic on Apple’s counts. It is a rate per submission, not per app: Apple’s footnote says “Apps may be submitted to App Review multiple times before they are approved,” and a rate per app cannot be worked out from what it publishes.⁴

The same report splits rejections by guideline section. In 2025: Performance 1,354,418; Legal 495,673; Design 415,532; Business 283,820; Safety 151,159.⁴ The sections add to more than the rejections because one submission can fail under several. Performance, the section that holds 2.1 App Completeness and 2.3 Accurate Metadata, appears on 64.7 percent of rejected submissions; it was 64.2 and 64.0 percent in 2023 and 2024. Legal is on 23.7 percent, Design on 19.9, Business on 13.6, Safety on 7.2.⁴ Apple’s own gloss on the page where it lists common issues: “On average, over 40% of unresolved issues are related to guideline 2.1: App Completeness, which covers crashes, placeholder content, incomplete information, and more.”¹

The Newsroom releases add the themes Apple wants to talk about. For 2025: “over 22,000 submissions for containing hidden or undocumented features; over 371,000 submissions that copied other apps, were found to be spam, or otherwise misled users; and over 443,000 submissions for privacy violations,” and “nearly 59,000 apps” removed “for engaging in such bait-and-switch maneuvers.”³ The privacy figure has climbed each year: over 375,000 (2023), 400,000 (2024), over 443,000 (2025).³

On speed, Apple’s public pages say much the same thing in two wordings and date it nowhere: “On average, 90% of submissions are reviewed in less than 24 hours” on the App Review page, “We review over 90% of apps within 24 hours” on its developer-facing App Store page.¹⁵ On who does the work, Apple’s App Store page says today: “Every week, nearly 500 dedicated experts around the world review over 130K apps.”⁵ Its 2024 release had it as “Apple’s App Review team of over 500 experts,” reviewing “approximately 132,500 apps a week”; the 2025 release says “nearly 150,000 app submissions each week” with no headcount; and the 2025 total works out to about 175,000 a week.³⁴ (The site’s own line read “over 500 dedicated experts … over 100K apps” in a June 2024 capture and “nearly 500 … over 130K” from an October 2025 capture on; I would not build a story on the difference between “over” and “nearly.”⁵) The 2026 release describes the division of labor: “Apple’s App Review has always combined human expertise with machine learning,” and “By utilizing AI to rapidly identify complex malicious patterns, analyze app similarity, and flag potentially problematic changes in app updates, Apple’s systems help human reviewers focus their expertise where it matters most.”³

Who looks, and for how long

The inside of the room is on the record because of a lawsuit. In Epic Games v. Apple, Apple’s head of App Review testified, its former head was deposed, Epic put documents from Apple’s own fraud team before the court, and the judge wrote findings of fact. Add two pieces of reporting from 2019, and what the former head has said since in an interview and in a post of his own (he says he built the team; he joined in 2009), and this is what the public record says about the people who review your app.^131415161718

How many. The court’s finding, September 2021: “Part of this issue stems from the sheer number of apps submitted with only 500 human reviewers.”¹³ The Verge, reporting the trial’s fifth day that May, had heard it the same way: “only 500 people actually do the ‘human review.’”¹⁸ Trystan Kosmynka, Apple’s senior director of App Review, put the volume in a sworn declaration a month later: “Apple receives approximately one hundred thousand submissions of apps and app reviews per week, with a yearly total of over 4 million submissions. In 2019, for example, Apple received 4,808,685 submissions. Of those submissions, 1,747,278 were rejected … This amounted to a rejection rate of 36 percent in 2019 … In 2020, the rejection rate rose to around 40 percent.”¹⁴ Apple’s own May releases pick the story up from there: the 2024 release, on 2023, “over 500 experts” and 132,500 a week; the 2025 release, on 2024, nearly 150,000 a week; and 9.1 million submissions in 2025, of which the transparency report counts 23 percent rejected (a different document from the declaration, and not shown to count the same way); its site today says “nearly 500.”³⁴⁵ Before the lawsuit, Apple’s 2019 “Principles and Practices” page described “a combination of automated systems and hundreds of human experts. This team represents 81 languages across three time zones,” with “100 K reviewed” a week, “60 % approved … 40 % rejected,” and “The most common reason for rejection is minor bugs, followed by privacy concerns.”⁵ CNBC’s 2019 reporting, from former reviewers and “people familiar with the process,” had the team at “more than 300 reviewers” in “a pair of offices in Sunnyvale, California,” Apple employees “paid hourly” with badges and benefits, not contractors.¹⁵ Apple’s job postings, read this autumn, still put the App Review Specialist roles in Sunnyvale, by language (Spanish, French, Chinese, Turkish); the Spanish posting lists two minimum qualifications, fluency in English and Spanish and a forty-hour week, and all four set that week, Tuesday to Saturday for some roles and Sunday to Thursday for others, which is how a queue is staffed seven days.¹⁹

For how long. The one per-app average on the record comes through Epic’s pretrial filing, citing Phillip Shoemaker’s deposition: as of April 2016, it says, “the human review process typically took approximately 13 minutes per app for new apps and 6 minutes per app for updates to existing apps.”¹⁶ The same filing, citing a trial exhibit (PX06): “App Reviewers typically review between 50 to 100 apps per day, and productivity is tracked internally,” and, in the paragraph after it, that reviewers in certain instances “took less than a minute.”¹⁶ CNBC’s sources said the same about the quota: “Reviewers have daily quotas of between 50 and 100 apps,” the number each gets through in an hour tracked “by software called Watchtower,” per screenshots the network saw, and “Most reviewers spend only a few minutes per app, but many apps are simple …”¹⁵ Shoemaker, who ran the team from 2009 to 2016, told Bloomberg in 2019 that in the early days three reviewers looked at each app; in Bloomberg’s account of his remarks, review times came down when the process went to one set of eyes, and reviewers would come in each morning and pick 30 to 100 apps from a web tool.¹⁷ The arithmetic on Apple’s current numbers, mine not Apple’s: 130,000 a week across nearly 500 people is about 260 each, or 52 a working day, at the bottom of the quota CNBC reported. Apple’s July 2026 posting for a “Tools and Automations Lead, App Review” says where the tooling is going: “designing and deploying GenAI and agent-based solutions (LLMs, RAG, agents) that augment review, surface risk, and reduce manual effort.”¹⁹

What a human does, by the court’s account. The findings describe the human part plainly: “During app review, a human reviewer confirms that an app corresponds to its marketing description. … The human reviewer also checks that the app’s entitlements are reasonable for the task it purports to accomplish. Thus, a Tic-Tac-Toe game may be rejected if it asks for camera access or health data. Last, although not directly related, app review checks for offline safety issues.”¹³ Kosmynka’s declaration lists the methods without an order: “Apple performs computerized static and dynamic analysis, as well as manual human review, on the compiled software, or ‘binary’ file,” together with the metadata; 9to5Mac’s summary of his trial filing put the automated analysis first and the human review after it.¹⁴¹⁸ Epic’s filing, citing a trial exhibit (PX140), says the “guiding principle in App Review” has from its inception been that it “review[s] … not test[s]” apps.¹⁶ And on the equipment, CNBC: “Reviewers ‘claim’ a batch of apps through a web portal on a Mac desktop, called App Claim. They often examine the app on an attached iPad, even if it’s an iPhone app.”¹⁵ That sentence, from 2019, is the other half of the iPad rejections developers keep posting.

How fast, and what happens when it isn’t. The court, from the testimony: “Apple promises in its Service Level Agreement to complete a review of an app quickly: 50 percent within 24 hours and 90 percent within 48 hours. Apple claims that it is completing 96 percent of the reviews within 24 hours.”¹³ CNBC described the same metric from the inside with a looser target, “Apple aims for 50% of apps to be reviewed within 24 to 48 hours,” and one bad day for it: “On July 30 last year [2018], the SLA fell to 6%, according to a staff email. ‘Until we catch up, we are opening up 12-hour days.’”¹⁵

Mistakes. Kosmynka, on the stand: “It’s a human process. We do make mistakes … But we certainly try to rectify those mistakes when we learn of them.”¹⁸ The court: “the overall error rate appears to be relatively small, with Apple’s former head of app review testifying that it was around 15% in 2015,” without saying what the 15 percent measures, and with a warning in the footnote that rejection-rate statistics “say[] nothing about the error rate.”¹³ Apple’s own fraud-engineering team was harsher, in Epic’s pretrial account of its head’s deposition and of documents Epic cited: the head’s view was that App Review “would not accomplish anything that would deter a sophisticated attacker,” and the team, Epic says, “further believed” that “App Review is bringing a plastic butter knife to a gun fight” and that the process amounts to “a wetware [i.e., a human-led] rate limiting service and nothing more.”¹⁶ Shoemaker, in a September 2026 post ahead of a book: “An approval is not a certification that an app is safe. It never was. It is a record that the app behaved itself during the window when a human being was watching.”¹⁷

Escalation. Two bodies sit above the reviewer. The App Review Board hears appeals; CNBC’s sources said it “is partially composed of reviewers with good track records.” Above it the Executive Review Board, led in 2019 by Phil Schiller, took “difficult approval decisions” and the “publicly sensitive” ones; Kosmynka’s declaration describes it as the body “which creates policies that apply to Apple’s App Store and app review process,” and Shoemaker described its weekly meeting as “four hours in a room arguing about apps.”¹⁵¹⁴¹⁷ Apple’s 2019 page said it in its own words: “All developers have the opportunity to have a rejection reviewed by the App Review Board. And the App Review team makes about 1,000 calls a week to developers to help them diagnose and resolve any issues that led to rejection.”⁵ Per 9to5Mac’s summary of Kosmynka’s trial filing, “less than 1% of developers appeal a rejection.”¹⁸

None of this is current beyond what Apple itself has said since: the headcount is from 2021 and from Apple’s site, the minutes from 2016, the quotas and the iPad from 2019, the two boards from 2019 to 2023, the shifts and the tooling from this year’s postings. It is the only inside view on the public record that I found.

What the review covers

Nobody at Apple has published the sequence a reviewer follows, and I am not going to invent one. What the record does give is the set of things reviews have been seen to check, because the rejection messages name them. Grouped, not ordered:

The listing. Metadata rejections cite the exact field: a support URL that “does not properly navigate to the intended destination,” screenshots that “do not sufficiently reflect your app in use,” an app name that “includes keywords or descriptors, which are not appropriate for use in an app name.”⁸ Apple’s statuses separate this outcome from a rejection of the binary: “Metadata Rejected” means “App Review didn’t accept your metadata. Read the message from App Review, edit the metadata to resolve the issue, and reply to the message from App Review,” and its help adds that “If your app was rejected for a metadata issue, you can resubmit the same build after resolving the issue.”¹¹

The app on real devices, including an iPad. Guideline 2.4.1 says “iPhone apps should run on iPad whenever possible,” and the record shows reviewers holding apps to it. A 2022 rejection attached a crash log with "modelCode" : "iPad7,5" for an app its developer had tested in the simulator. A 2017 message: “We noticed that your app did not run at iPhone resolution when reviewed on iPad running iOS 10.2.” In May 2026 a developer reported four rejections because, in their words, typing into the sign-in fields “on an iPad Air 11-inch (M3) running iPadOS 26.4.2 causes the fields to clear.” When one developer sent an iPhone screen recording to argue the point, the reply was: “While we appreciate that your app is intended primarily for use on iPhone, in order to bring your app into compliance with App Store guidelines, all apps designed for use on iPhone must still be formatted correctly and behave properly when running on iPad.” The same thread records: “We are unable to provide further information regarding our review environment.”⁷ Four posts across nine years do not prove every review uses an iPad. They do show it is a normal thing for a review to do.

Launch, and whatever is reachable. Guideline 2.1(a) is the rule being applied: “Submissions to App Review … should be final versions with all necessary metadata and fully functional URLs included; placeholder text, empty websites, and other temporary content should be scrubbed before submission. … We will reject incomplete app bundles and binaries that crash or exhibit obvious technical problems.”² The crash message has read the same way since at least 2015: “We were unable to review your app as it crashed on launch. We have attached detailed crash logs to help troubleshoot this issue.”⁸ Anything behind a login needs the demo account from App Review Information; the message for a bad one is “We were unable to sign in to review your app with the demo account information you provided.”⁸

Declared capabilities. Background modes get exercised: “Your app declares support for audio in the UIBackgroundModes key in your Info.plist, but we were unable to play any audible content when the app was running in the background.”⁸ Frameworks get checked against features: “your binary includes the PassKit framework for implementing Apple Pay, but we were unable to verify any integration of Apple Pay within your app.”⁸ Permission prompts are read for their purpose strings: “all permission request alerts need to specify how your app will use the requested information. … Make sure the purpose string includes an example of how the user’s data will be used.”⁸

Purchases, in the sandbox. Apple’s receipt-validation documentation says the review environment is the sandbox: use the test URL “when testing your app in the sandbox and while your app is in review,” and the production-first, fall-back-on-21007 rule is there because, in Apple’s words, “This approach ensures you don’t have to switch between URLs while your app is in testing, in review by App Review, or live in the App Store.”²⁰ (The page is about receipt validation; it is still the place where Apple says which environment the review runs in.) Every product you configured is expected to be findable; 2.1(b): “If you offer in-app purchases in your app, make sure they are complete, up-to-date, visible to the reviewer and functional. If any configured in-app purchase items cannot be found or reviewed in your app, explain the reason in your review notes.”² A 2024 rejection: “We are unable to complete the review of your app because one or more of your in-app purchase products have not been submitted for review.”⁸ For subscriptions the sign-up screen is held to the agreement, Schedule 2 §3.8(b): “Title of auto-renewing subscription,” “Length of subscription,” “Price of subscription, and price per unit if appropriate,” and “Links to Your Privacy Policy and Terms of Use must be accessible within Your Licensed Application.”²¹

Links. Support URL, privacy policy, Terms of Use, inside the app and in the listing. Apple’s common-issues page: “All links in your app must be functional. A link to user support with up-to-date contact information and a link to your privacy policy is required for all apps.”¹ The 1.5 rejection names the URL that failed and asks for “a webpage with support information”; a page that was only an email address got the same message.⁸

The privacy policy, the privacy label, the age rating. These are rules more than observed checks: I found no posted rejection for a wrong privacy label or a wrong age rating. Guideline 5.1.1(i) requires the privacy policy “in the App Store Connect metadata field and within the app in an easily accessible manner.”² For the label, Apple’s definition of collecting is the thing to know: “‘Collect’ refers to transmitting data off the device in a way that allows you and/or your third-party partners to access it for a period longer than what is necessary to service the transmitted request in real time,” and “if data is sent to your servers then immediately discarded after servicing the request, you do not need to disclose this in your answers in App Store Connect.”²² For the rating, 2.3.6: “Answer the age rating questions in App Store Connect honestly so that your app aligns properly with parental controls.”²

The decision, in a message. Apple’s help describes the exchange that used to be called the Resolution Center and is now the App Review section: “When your app is rejected, you’ll get a message containing information about the rejection, including how it violates the App Review Guidelines … You can correspond with Apple, and include attachments, such as screenshots and supporting documents, until you resubmit to App Review.”¹¹ If a submission holds several items, “App Review needs to approve all items. To continue with the accepted items, you need to either edit and resubmit, or remove the rejected items from the submission.”¹¹

Two process facts shape how you plan around all this. “Each platform can have one app version submission under review at a time.”¹⁰ And an app already on the store gets a concession: “bug fixes will not be delayed over guideline violations except for those related to legal or safety issues,” which you accept, in the App Review page’s words, by replying “to the offer message in App Store Connect.”²¹

What gets apps rejected

The most recent guideline-by-guideline ranking Apple has published is a single week, the seven days ending April 3, 2018, on a page it took down in 2019 (it had published weeks in 2015 and 2016 under the old numbering):⁶

The top ten were 88 percent of rejections that week. The section-level counts in the transparency reports measure something different (citations per year, overlapping, not shares of one week), so they can’t confirm that list; what they say for 2023 through 2025 is that Performance sits on about two thirds of rejected submissions, Legal on about a quarter, Design on between a sixth and a fifth, Business on about one in nine to one in seven, Safety on about one in seventeen to one in fourteen.⁴ I found no vendor dataset from 2023 to 2026 that ranks rejections by guideline with a stated sample, though the search tools available to me were limited; the guides from RevenueCat, Runway and Bitrise are checklists, and one of them reproduces a template bug from Apple’s own page (a literal $!{infoPlistKey} where a key name should be).²³

The exact words

Rejection messages are templates, and knowing the template tells you what was checked. These are quoted as developers posted them, with the year. Only the subscription and iPad messages are confirmed in use after 2024; Apple may have reworded the others since.⁸

• Subscriptions (3.1.2), 2022, and quoted again in a September 2025 answer: “We noticed that your app did not meet all the terms and conditions for auto-renewing subscriptions, as specified in Schedule 2, section 3.8(b) of the Paid Applications agreement. … We were unable to find the following required item(s) in your app’s metadata: – A functional link to the Terms of Use (EULA) … If you are using the standard Apple Terms of Use (EULA), you will need to include a link to the Terms of Use in your App Description. If you are using a custom EULA, add it in App Store Connect.” The 2023 variant asks for the privacy link too, “in your app’s binary” and “in your app’s metadata.”
• Crash (2.1), 2022: “We were unable to review your app as it crashed on launch. We have attached detailed crash logs to help troubleshoot this issue.”
• In-app purchases not in the submission (2.1), 2024: “We are unable to complete the review of your app because one or more of your in-app purchase products have not been submitted for review.”
• Purpose string (5.1.1), 2020: “We noticed that your app requests the user’s consent to access the location, but doesn’t sufficiently explain the use of the location in the purpose string.”
• Support URL (1.5), 2019: “The support URL specified in your app’s metadata does not properly navigate to the intended destination.”
• Screenshots (2.3.3), 2018: “We noticed that your screenshots do not sufficiently reflect your app in use. Specifically, your screenshots do not display the actual app in use.”
• Minimum functionality (4.2), 2019: “We found that the usefulness of your app is limited by the minimal amount of content or features it includes. … We understand that there are no hard and fast rules to define useful or entertaining, but Apple and Apple customers expect apps to provide a really great user experience.”
• Spam (4.3), 2017: “We noticed that your app provides the same feature set as other apps you’ve submitted to the App Store; it simply varies in content or language, which is considered a form of spam.” With a warning that “Future submissions of this app, and other apps associated with your Apple Developer account, will also experience a delayed review.”
• User-generated content (1.2), 2017: “Your app enables the display of user-generated content but does not have the proper precautions in place,” followed by five requirements, two of which are stricter than the guideline’s text: “Require that users agree to terms (EULA) and these terms must make it clear that there is no tolerance for objectionable content or abusive users” and “The developer must act on objectionable content reports within 24 hours by removing the content and ejecting the user who provided the offending content.”
• Background modes (2.5.4), 2023: “Your app declares support for audio in the UIBackgroundModes key in your Info.plist, but we were unable to play any audible content when the app was running in the background.”
• Intellectual property (5.2), 2021: “Your app contains content or features that may violate the rights of one or more third parties. … please attach documentary evidence in the App Review Information section in App Store Connect evidencing that you have all necessary rights or permissions …”

What changed in 2025 and 2026

Dated from Apple’s developer news feed, newest first.⁹

• August 5, 2026: a new “creative assets” type for product pages, where “you can go beyond in-use visuals to highlight your brand.” How App Review treats these against 2.3.3’s “app in use” rule for screenshots is not yet documented.
• July 9, 2026: the age-rating questionnaire gains social-media questions. “A social media capability is defined as the ability to redistribute, amplify, or interact with user-generated content through a social feed or similar discovery method,” and “beginning in September 2026, responses will be required when submitting new apps or updates to the App Store.”
• June 8, 2026: guidelines revised: “Introduction: revised kid and teen safety guidance. 1.2: new paragraph clarifies developer responsibilities for content that violates this guideline. 4.3(a) … 4.3(b): clarifies the basis for the guideline and adds examples.” The new 1.2 paragraph: “It is your responsibility to remove content that violates this guideline, your terms of service, or your community standards. If we find such content, we will ask you to remove it, and provide a plan to improve your compliance with this guideline.”²
• February 24, 2026: “Apple will block users in Australia, Brazil, and Singapore from downloading apps rated 18+ unless they have been confirmed to be adults.”
• February 6, 2026: guidelines revised “to clarify that apps with random or anonymous chat are subject to the 1.2 User-Generated Content guideline.”
• February 3, 2026: “Starting April 28, 2026, apps and games uploaded to App Store Connect need to meet the following minimum requirements: iOS and iPadOS apps must be built with the iOS 26 & iPadOS 26 SDK or later.”
• November 13, 2025: a new 4.1(c), “you cannot use another developer’s icon, brand, or product name in your app’s icon or name, without approval from the developer”; 5.1.2(i) now says you must “clearly disclose where personal data will be shared with third parties, including with third-party AI, and obtain explicit permission before doing so”; 2.5.10’s ban on “empty ad banners or test advertisements” was deleted; a new 1.2.1(a) requires creator apps to use “an age restriction mechanism based on verified or declared age.”
• October 29, 2025: the submission model widens: “you can now send additional items to App Review independent of an existing submission,” including Game Center features.
• July 24, 2025: “The updated age rating system adds 13+, 16+, and 18+ to the existing 4+ and 9+ ratings,” with answers required “by January 31, 2026.”

The submission model matters more than it sounds. App Store Connect Help: “The first consumable, non-consumable, auto-renewable subscription, and non-renewing subscription In-App Purchase of each type must be submitted with a new app version,” and “The app version, subscription group, and every subscription or In-App Purchase you want reviewed together must all be added to the same draft submission before you click Submit for Review.” For Game Center: “Include components in the same submission as your app version if this is the first time you’re adding them to an app.”¹² Adding the version to a draft and submitting it, which is what the page’s Add for Review and Submit for Review buttons do, leaves products you didn’t add in “Ready to Submit” and Game Center components in “Prepare for Submission,” unreviewed (those are App Store Connect’s own status labels, read off our app’s records).²⁴ The 2.1 rejection about products “not … submitted for review” is this model biting. It bites once: after the first item of a type is approved, the same help says, “you can submit additional items of that type without a new app version,” and “For subsequent components, you can submit them without an app version.”¹²

A checklist from the rules and the record

The sections above, as a list to run against your own listing the night before. The first seven are things rejection messages show reviewers checking; the last five are what the rules require whether or not anyone has posted a rejection for them.

1. The app launches and whatever a reviewer can reach works, on an iPhone and on an iPad, on the current OS, without a crash, a blank view or placeholder text (2.1, 2.4.1).
2. Anything behind a login has a demo account in App Review Information (Apple’s help: it “must not expire”), or a demo mode agreed in advance (2.1(a)).¹⁰
3. Every in-app purchase and subscription you want reviewed is in a submission, and the first of each type is in the same one as a version, visible in the app and buyable in the sandbox; a restore mechanism exists for anything restorable (2.1(b), 3.1.1).
4. The subscription screen shows the name, the length, the amount to be billed as the most prominent pricing element, and links to the privacy policy and Terms of Use; the listing’s description links the Terms of Use if you use Apple’s standard EULA (3.1.2, Schedule 2 §3.8(b)).²¹²⁵
5. The support URL opens a page with a way to contact you; the privacy policy URL opens the policy; both are also reachable inside the app (1.5, 5.1.1(i)).
6. Every permission prompt’s purpose string says what the data is for, with an example (5.1.1(ii)).
7. Every background mode you declare does what it says while the app is in the background (2.5.4); a framework linked for a feature the app doesn’t have has drawn a rejection too.
8. The privacy label matches what leaves the device and stays anywhere; the age-rating answers match the content, including the September 2026 social-media questions (5.1.2, 2.3.6).
9. Screenshots show the app in use on the right device; the name, subtitle, screenshots and previews carry no prices or terms; keywords carry no other apps’ or companies’ names and no trademarked terms you aren’t authorized to use (2.3.3, 2.3.7, and the keyword field’s own rules).²⁶
10. If the app shows what its users make or lets them meet (1.2’s “user-generated content or social networking services”), there is filtering, a report path with a response, a block, and published contact information, and nothing in it is a service “used primarily for … random or anonymous chat” (1.2).
11. Third-party content in the app has a terms-of-use basis you could show on request (5.2.1, 5.2.2).
12. The review notes describe every non-obvious feature “with specificity” (Apple’s words: “generic descriptions will be rejected”), name where the purchases are, explain anything the reviewer cannot exercise, and say that backends are live (2.3.1(a), 2.1(b), “Before You Submit”).²

Red-teaming our own app against it

Kiradex is a free collector’s app for Pokémon trading cards: every set, have and want lists, a camera scanner, a 3D card viewer, prices from the public TCGdex catalog, a small “plaza” where collectors’ pixel avatars share a square through our relay server, Game Center achievements, six “gift” tips and one Patron subscription in two lengths, all of which unlock cosmetic flair. Its 1.0 went into App Store Connect on October 4 from Xcode 27 (the Duo post has why), and on October 5 I ran the list above against it. Here is what that found, with the fix, grouped by the checklist item it falls under.²⁴

Three things stay open and are judgment, not checklist. The card images are The Pokémon Company’s; TCGdex’s terms say “Pokémon card information and images are licensed by The Pokémon Company,” and I read nothing in them that grants rights in the images.²⁷ Independent card apps with “Pokémon” in their names or subtitles and card images are live and were updated on the store in September 2026, one of them with the same kind of disclaimer we carry, which says Apple tolerates the category today, not that a licence exists.²⁷ And the plaza, where 1.2 asks two different things. Apps with “user-generated content or social networking services” must have four mechanisms, and it has a version of each (fixed lines for filtering, a report path, a hide, a published address), said in the notes. Separately, services “used primarily for … random or anonymous chat” “do not belong on the App Store,” and February’s revision put random or anonymous chat squarely under the rule; strangers with generated handles saying fixed lines to each other is near that line. What we can say is that the plaza is one tab of a collector’s app, nothing in it is typed, and the lines are ours; whether a reviewer reads a square of pixel collectors as a chat service is theirs to decide. The third is smaller: 3.1.2(a) says a subscription “must provide ongoing value to the customer,” and Patron’s value is the standing each month adds on the ladder and the flair that standing unlocks, which is cosmetic; whether that is ongoing value is the reviewer’s reading too.

One more, which is why the build itself was not settled when this was written: on the simulators, the full-screen card viewer has come up black on a second or third opening in a share of the regression walk’s runs (about half of them, by the walk’s record as of October 4), with the 3D scene whole and ticking underneath, on two iOS runtimes.²⁴ Making the cover opaque made the first opening black on every try, which pointed at a texture made for the inspector’s RealityView and reused by the viewer’s; each stage now makes its own. After that, the walk’s five runs on October 5 split: one had all three openings lit, the second at eight seconds rather than four; four had a later opening black through sixteen seconds (in one of them the second opening lit at twelve), and in one of those, frames of the simulator’s own display taken from the Mac were black too, with the Close button drawn, so it is the stage that draws nothing, not the test’s screenshot. Waiting eight seconds between openings instead of one changed nothing, and making the card’s mesh per stage, as the texture now is, changed nothing either. The readings look like a delay with a long tail rather than a fixed black, though a handful of runs cannot tell those apart, and the cause is not in the logs, which read the same for a lit opening and a black one. Whether a real iPhone does it at all is the question that matters; that device walk had not run when this was published, and the build in review carried the question. Later the same morning: the phone answered. The same walk, same build, ran on an iPhone 17 Pro Max on iOS 27.0 over the local network, and all three openings lit at four seconds, each reading 0.55 of the stage lit, the same figure as the simulator’s good openings.²⁴ The black is the simulator’s renderer; on hardware the viewer draws first time, every time, and guideline 2.1 has nothing to catch.

Key Takeaways

• The guideline Apple itself points at first is 2.1, completeness: crashes, blank screens, missing demo access, products that are not in the submission. Apple’s figure is “over 40% of unresolved issues”; in the last week it ranked, 2.1 was 42 percent of rejections.¹⁶
• Assume an iPad. Reviewers have run iPhone-only apps on one for years, and an app being “intended primarily for use on iPhone” is not a defence Apple accepted.⁷
• The submission is a container. For a new app, put the version, every product, the subscription group and the Game Center components in it; submitting the version alone leaves the rest unreviewed. The first product of each type, and the first Game Center components, need a version with them; once a type has been approved and the app has an approved version, later products of that type and later components can go on their own.¹²
• Templates tell you the check. The EULA line, the support-URL line, the purpose-string line: each names the field the reviewer opened. Read them before you submit, not after.
• Do the pass yourself. Ours was a listing three people had read, and it still had eleven things to fix, most of them under guidelines in the top-ten list above (2.1, 5.1.1, 3.1.1, 2.3.7).

FAQ

How long does App Review take in 2026?

Apple’s published figure, in two wordings: “On average, 90% of submissions are reviewed in less than 24 hours,” and “We review over 90% of apps within 24 hours,” undated and without a method.¹⁵ The 2021 trial added two more, from testimony: a service-level target of 50 percent within 24 hours and 90 percent within 48, and Apple’s claim that it was completing 96 percent within 24 hours.¹³ The guidelines add that complex apps “may require greater scrutiny,” that repeat violations mean review “will take longer to complete,” and that after approval “it can take up to 24-hours for your app to appear on all selected storefronts.”¹²

How many apps does Apple reject?

In 2025, 2,093,244 of 9,100,620 submissions, by the transparency report; “over 2 million” of “more than 9.1 million” in the Newsroom’s words. That is 23 percent of submissions. Apple does not publish a rate per app.³⁴

Does App Review test on an iPad if my app is iPhone-only?

Often enough that you should build for it. Rejection messages have named the iPad and its OS for iPhone apps since 2017, and Apple has told a developer that iPhone apps “must still be formatted correctly and behave properly when running on iPad.” Whether every review uses one, Apple doesn’t say.⁷

Do I have to link the Terms of Use in my description?

If your app has auto-renewable subscriptions and you use Apple’s standard EULA, the rejection template says so in as many words: “include a link to the Terms of Use in your App Description.” Apple’s subscriptions page: “your app and App Store metadata must include links to your Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.”⁸²⁵

Are in-app purchases reviewed with the app automatically?

No. They are items you add to a submission; the first of each type “must be submitted with a new app version,” and once that type has been approved, later ones can go “without a new app version, as long as your app has at least one approved app version at the time of submission.” Game Center achievements and leaderboards work the same way the first time.¹²

What changed for new apps in 2026?

Social-media answers in the age-rating questionnaire are required since September 2026; uploads must use the iOS 26 SDK or later since April 28, 2026; random or anonymous chat is under guideline 1.2 since February; and the guidelines’ June 8 revision clarified the duty to remove violating content and to provide a plan when Apple asks for one.⁹

Related on this site: the iPhone Duo preparation post is where this app’s submission calendar is worked out; the screenshots post covers the 2.3.3 and 2.3.7 rules for the product page; the social-media declaration post covers the new age-rating questions; and the privacy manifest deep dive covers the privacy manifest.

Sources