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Comment by antris | Hacker News Reader

> If they shut you down on the App Store, you're done. Your iOS app is worthless on any other platform.

> I shit you not, I've personally had apps rejected by the review board because they didn't like the screenshots. Those were screenshots of the app itself.

My experience sending applications to the app store was certainly frustrating as a first-comer as the App Store has numerous rules about the screenshots, descriptions, naming etc. that you have to follow.

However, every time the app got rejected, the reviewer sent clear feedback on which rules the submissions were violating and how to fix those issues. After that, you could send your app for another review. Calling that "shutting you down" is slightly harsh in my ear. We fixed the problems they had with our submission and then we got approved.

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I agree with this partially. I have had very good feedback from the reviewers when my app was rejected. I could find and fix their issues, I may not agree with it, but the terms were clear.

Also... I've submitted a minor bug fix and got flagged on something I did not change that was previously approved and their terms did not change. That gets frustrating. I feel like every update is a gamble. Some parts of it seem pretty vague. Sometimes I just resubmit and get a new reviewer and he approves on the iffy ones. But with people in the loop interpretation is always a thing and I can't get too mad over it.

> Also... I've submitted a minor bug fix and got flagged on something I did not change that was previously approved and their terms did not change

Luckily, this is something they recently said they won’t do anymore

Since when? This happened to me a week ago.

June. The App Store review being as inconsistent as it is I’m not exactly surprised that it doesn’t always work

Even if it happens less frequently now, the fact that this is still a possibility at all makes submitting anything to the app store a really frustrating experience. Particularly for bugfixes I just really want to fix the bug ASAP, not have to invest a bunch of time changing some unrelated feature (or even wasting another review cycle). Consequently I do try to minimize my total number of submissions.

Turns out the announcement was in june, and the process change is starting today [0] I agree with you though, the review process, especially because it's super inconsistent and even Apple themselves sem to be care about some rules more than others, is quite a pain

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=84w3e5bm

I saw this too. Great news if true (thank you, court of public opinion). Still a little bit unclear how Apple will know that my changes are just bugfixes; are they going to read my minified javascript?

I do appreciate those rules because they lead to a higher quality listing.

I had a bugfix update rejected a little while ago for a business app.

Apple wanted a video walkthrough of every screen in the app, explaining what each screen is for and with a breakdown of device permissions needed on each of those screens. That day was a complete write-off. If the app required excessive permissions I could understand there might be some concern, but it doesn't. Any permissions we do need are justified in the info.plist as required, and are very descriptive.

They then rejected it again the next day, as I had apparently failed to mention what we use ARKit for in the video. We don't use ARKit and it is not in the codebase.

Another day goes by and they finally approve, with a friendly disclaimer that they will now require an updated video with every future update.

It just seems like busywork to me.

I only added the rejection as an illustrative anecdote.

My main point is not about rejecting an update, but about pulling you out of the store entirely or never accepting your app. Even deleting your Apple dev account as we just saw with Epic.

Your experiences are not necessarily representative of that of all iOS developers.

Even if they are representative of 99% of experiences - imagine the damage and anger caused by the remaining 1%.

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