So the following day, while we were submitting a bug fix release, a reviewer rejected the app on the grounds that it advertised a premium service that was not available via Apple’s IAP subscriptions. We later found out they were talking about the news article preview tile. Their demand was that we remove all outbound links to the domain that hosts the premium content unless we implement Apple’s subscriptions. This would have included news articles, guides, account sign in and settings and other core components of the app that just happened to link to the site.
So we did the only thing we could do. The entire engineering team committed the rest of the week (including the weekend) to complying with Apple’s demand and we integrated Apple payments into our backend and app. Of course this blocked us from deploying critical bug fixes but we had no other option.