> My app was REJECTED from submission FOUR TIMES in row. Always same reason (eg. my app is “design spam” and “duplicates existing apps” and it is createed using “app generation template services”) as shown bellow in screenshots. Which is obvious nonsense.
You can feel the entitlement across the room from the developer. They seem to be unable to conceive that outside of their bubble there can be a real case of AI spamming that same look and feel, even if they did it by heart.
Looking at his work, it's clearly modelled after Serum (which even the article describes as "a sort of Serum 2 for iOS") so I am not sure why they think this suddenly deserves a white glove service here.
The App Store is also flooded with Synth apps, so regardless of the UI being the trigger here, I would imagine the category itself has been flagged as spammy and now has a higher bar of entry.
If anything I would use this as an opportunity to reskin and try to stand out, they're giving you a blueprint of what will perform better on the algorithm if you avoid that look if you think about it.
I wouldn't describe it as entitlement. I think one of the issues I would have if I was in this situation is that the developer membership is paid for and the service provider (Apple) is actively refusing to let you engage in part of what you did pay for (the ability to publish apps on the App Store). You can bet that Apple won't give you a refund of that membership fee.
They provided reasons and it is within the terms of service of what you paid for, they were also able to appeal, and I suggest you check the app and the reference app to which the claim is being made against.
I mean they are entitled to it in a way. You pay Apple 99 Dollars a year to be able to distribute your apps on the store. Why should apple care if it is design spam or a duplicate of an existing app? Most of the apps available in the store would check those boxes too.
technically, anyone can grab a copy of source, put their phone into developer mode and install the app too.
But- practically, it's hard.
You only get 4 application slots on devices in dev mode for example and I think they also expire.
I tried creating an internal app for my company and was gobsmacked that I didn't have any sane method to distribute it short of taking full ownership of everyones devices via MDM.
You are of course not allowed to publish "internal" apps to Testflight (or the App Store, but that's more obvious).
“Just try an alt store” is a condescendingly flippant comment - there is near zero market for iOS alt stores and most people in most countries have no access either.
My above comment is not an excuse for design spam. The design spam rule is necessary. Your feedback is not.
Synths have never been a high profit business on iOS. And small earners are not a priority for Apple review. There’s a business case for not being bothered with most indie apps.
To suggest there’s categorically no room for innovation or value add with new synth products is just ignorant though.
There is also near zero market for more Synth Apps at this point so I'm not sure what you want here.
It's like when the App Store started, someone made a Flashlight App and it was cool. We sure had enough of that by now. Now that AI turned everyone into a maker and the bar is lower in a world of abundance, it's only natural that things shift in terms of expectations for distribution.
This is how new markets take shape too, YouTube became so trash that now platforms such as Nebula came out as a business.
I’m genuinely not sure if you’re doing a bit, especially after explicitly calling out the “entitlement” of the development.
Is “we don’t think there’ll be a market for this” a defensible reason to disqualify an app from the App Store? What’s even your point? You are just looking to be argumentative and pretty clearly have no interest in actually discussing this.
I'll take the callout, I did get emotional. Reason being is because I have bought over 20 synth apps and have worked in the music industry. Looking at the app and the way they reacted to not getting approved made me upset.
Is entitlement always a problem? Maybe if apple didn't try their best to hold a monopoly on app distribution for a large percentage of the mobile userbase, developers wouldn't feel frustrated in this regard. Who's apple to decide which apps aren't allowed because they "duplicate existing apps", and how fairly is that even applied? Are calculators allowed on the app store? It seems awfully like they duplicate existing functionality.
First, I am not trusting them at face value. They are building a copycat of Serum and most likely could be doing some level of vibe-coding themselves.
Second, to your point, say we trusted them, it's a chicken or the egg problem. After all the trash entered the space it became flagged and a scale/moderation issue.
I've been waiting about two weeks for the last review for my app, I got one rejection and that took 20 days. It's a bit of a bummer but there isn't anything I can do about it.
Have just submitted two new apps last week and they’ve been published 2 days later. Updated them a couple of times this week and that also took around 2 days.
Not sure if it’s because I have a good track record but I only had been rejected a couple of times and even then I just had to submit a screen recording of me playing with the app to make it pass the review process.
I'm not sure what Apple can do here; Pandora's box is open and it won't be closed. It felt like there was a flood of app releases in the early 2010s during the gold rush. I can't even imagine it now.
I noticed that Apple has been updating their documentation so developers can have less back and forth when releasing an app.
Apple has anti-spam app policies that basically limit innovation and competition in certain product categories. An extreme example would be Apple not allowing any more "sleep music apps" b/c there is enough in the store.
An investor actually approached me about buying a couple mobile apps I made b/c they are "aged" and don't need to go through the rigorous first-review approval process
A lot, they _can_ do almost whatever they want with their own AppStore and own business model. Including making good on the anti-trust lawsuit they've got for a decade around the world and let go of their monopoly.
We shouldn't make it sound like they _have to be_ the bad guys. Even from a business standpoint they're slowly losing the grip on their market and getting back some goodwill wouldn't be a bad thing.
They will not. Why would high revenue be a reason to hire more?
They look at margins and they want to optimize them, not use better margins as a reason to pursue smaller margins. Small time indie developers and businesses that earn them less than millions a month in fees are not worth their time. They’re solving this by automating more telemetry, not by hiring more junior and senior reviewers. They don’t want to take a loss on small devs.
Hire more reviewers. Apple is making a shitload of money from App Store sales (and of course by scamming its users in many creative ways). They'd better spend it on making developers happier, not on thickening the walls of their garden.
They don’t make a shitload off the small apps like the synthesizer from this post. They aren’t going to introduce more expensive Cupertino and Cork reviewers to help that category of dev. They’re a business and will automate instead of have small time earners occupy more time on reviewer desks.
In both of these cases the platforms are absurdly profitable, 75% profit margin for Apple, fleet of mega-yachts for Steam, the solution is they stop skimping on review and hire more people to keep up.
I am more interested in the fact so many people are spamming the app store. What are they hoping for actually? If you can write a prompt for it, anyone can do it. There's no value in an app like before. I think those times are over.
Maybe the "democratization" of it will bring in fresh ideas. Maybe not. But anyway basically no one will make any money or have any success off these vibe coded apps.
There is a surge of vibe coded apps in the iOS community.
Some of them are good - generally by musicians or sound designers who couldn't code.
Many are utter trash, designed by developers who have barely any musical taste and simply told Claude to make some glitchy reverb pedal or groovebox. They use AI to write the copy for the app store and leave the UI as default (navy with fixed width headers, often looking like more like a spreadsheet than a synth). Sometimes trying to charge as much as $30 for it. It's a scourge but on the upside, most of them have now got their dopamine fix and moved onto something else.
>It was over a month of back-and-forth, so I threw my hands up and released it audio-only for now. What we will do is bundle the MIDI build into the binary so both AUv3s install.
Oh, so they are trying to do a soft bait and switch; where an app developer makes an app, splits its functionality, and sells both on the app store. They hope that someone buys the first app, which is missing basic functionality, not realizing they have to buy a second app to get the additional expected features. Like if you buy a video converter app that doesn't let you convert to an MP4 unless you buy a second "MP4 version" video converter app. Scummy behavior, glad Apple blocked it.
Apple and Google are a mobile cartel, they need to be broken up.
This is absurd.
If people want the editorialized 'safety' of an App Store, they can use it, that's fine, but there's no reason to stop people from buying apps for their phone from wherever they want.
I m waiting for weeks to just enroll in their developer program, that i have paid for. Are they deliberately stalling everything to stop people from putting more stuff in the app store? I m going to go ahead and release the android version and make sure to badmouth apple to their users. life is short
The title is too friendly to Apple. Sure the flood of apps is making their lives harder, but also remember that they choose to force everyone through this and you have to PAY them to do their job this badly.
It's more than that, they choose to do the absolute least they can and pocket immense profits. In 2021 the judge in the Epic case called them out for only having 500 reviewers now it's 2026 and they still only have 500 reviewers.
In a land of commodified apps, the platform has all the power and the dev has none. Like at this point, they could up their cut to 90% of revenue. There would be an outcry and many devs would leave. But in the end getting even 10% of the revenue of an app you whipped together by telling claude to "make an app, no mistakes" is too good to refuse.
A company I'm familiar with had their app rejected for "App does not contain means to delete accounts"
Then all subsequent ones were rejected "Developer provided test account stopped working"
Logs show that the tester used the "delete my account" function..
As the only customer service available is an uncaring LLM, the only solution that worked was to keep the "Delete my account" button in the app, and make it a NOP on the server side.
This is my experience with app review. They’ll flag things as the exact opposite of what they are in reality. It’s like Apple intentionally hired the worst people to randomly gatekeep the App Store.
"About 80% of the reviewers on my team were former Apple retail employees. Many were Geniuses, the people who fixed your phone at the store. The other 20% came from elsewhere. They came from bartending, tree trimming, and tech."
"When I was there, a new app got about 13 minutes. An update got about 6. Those 13 minutes cover every localization, every screen, and every purchase described above."
This is why app review is a joke, and why the App Store is full of crap and scams.
According to Shoemaker, Steve Jobs demanded that Apple review every app, but Jobs resigned from Apple only 2.5 years after the App Store opened. More than 15 years later, it's clear that the App Store has outgrown the expectations of the dying Jobs.
I suspect that Jobs would have changed and adapted if he had lived, but Tim Cook seemed content to cash in on the easy App Store revenue.
Apple's app review process has always been a silly game. I have a music playing app, and every actual screenshot gets rejected in review for "displaying copyrighted content" (album art). And the terms of review say the screenshots must come from the app, not be mockups. So dumb. I have a fake music collection of fake artists and albums that I load to generate screenshots ... colossal waste of time.
> My app was REJECTED from submission FOUR TIMES in row. Always same reason (eg. my app is “design spam” and “duplicates existing apps” and it is createed using “app generation template services”) as shown bellow in screenshots. Which is obvious nonsense.
You can feel the entitlement across the room from the developer. They seem to be unable to conceive that outside of their bubble there can be a real case of AI spamming that same look and feel, even if they did it by heart.
Looking at his work, it's clearly modelled after Serum (which even the article describes as "a sort of Serum 2 for iOS") so I am not sure why they think this suddenly deserves a white glove service here.
The App Store is also flooded with Synth apps, so regardless of the UI being the trigger here, I would imagine the category itself has been flagged as spammy and now has a higher bar of entry.
If anything I would use this as an opportunity to reskin and try to stand out, they're giving you a blueprint of what will perform better on the algorithm if you avoid that look if you think about it.
Or just try an Alt Store.
I wouldn't describe it as entitlement. I think one of the issues I would have if I was in this situation is that the developer membership is paid for and the service provider (Apple) is actively refusing to let you engage in part of what you did pay for (the ability to publish apps on the App Store). You can bet that Apple won't give you a refund of that membership fee.
They provided reasons and it is within the terms of service of what you paid for, they were also able to appeal, and I suggest you check the app and the reference app to which the claim is being made against.
I mean they are entitled to it in a way. You pay Apple 99 Dollars a year to be able to distribute your apps on the store. Why should apple care if it is design spam or a duplicate of an existing app? Most of the apps available in the store would check those boxes too.
Everyone is entitled to run whatever the hell they want on their own device. End of.
Technically, he can run his app on his device.
technically, anyone can grab a copy of source, put their phone into developer mode and install the app too.
But- practically, it's hard.
You only get 4 application slots on devices in dev mode for example and I think they also expire.
I tried creating an internal app for my company and was gobsmacked that I didn't have any sane method to distribute it short of taking full ownership of everyones devices via MDM.
You are of course not allowed to publish "internal" apps to Testflight (or the App Store, but that's more obvious).
You're entitled to a way to have others try you software on devices they own that doesn't involve paying Apple $99/year for the privilege.
and you have limitations on app ids. Apple sucks…
Sure, but this developer wants to publish their app through the App Store. Not the same thing as running on their own device.
I am not aware of a way to publish an app without an App Store.
At least on Android you can make them self updating and not care about rest of the ecosystem
You can install development builds on your own iPhone, you just need to enable Developer Mode: https://docs.expo.dev/guides/ios-developer-mode/
Ah but it is!
Web page
Audio software needs low latency. Can you actually make a synth in browser that's good? And integrates with DAWs?
No
“Just try an alt store” is a condescendingly flippant comment - there is near zero market for iOS alt stores and most people in most countries have no access either.
My above comment is not an excuse for design spam. The design spam rule is necessary. Your feedback is not.
Synths have never been a high profit business on iOS. And small earners are not a priority for Apple review. There’s a business case for not being bothered with most indie apps.
To suggest there’s categorically no room for innovation or value add with new synth products is just ignorant though.
There is also near zero market for more Synth Apps at this point so I'm not sure what you want here.
It's like when the App Store started, someone made a Flashlight App and it was cool. We sure had enough of that by now. Now that AI turned everyone into a maker and the bar is lower in a world of abundance, it's only natural that things shift in terms of expectations for distribution.
This is how new markets take shape too, YouTube became so trash that now platforms such as Nebula came out as a business.
I’m genuinely not sure if you’re doing a bit, especially after explicitly calling out the “entitlement” of the development.
Is “we don’t think there’ll be a market for this” a defensible reason to disqualify an app from the App Store? What’s even your point? You are just looking to be argumentative and pretty clearly have no interest in actually discussing this.
I'll take the callout, I did get emotional. Reason being is because I have bought over 20 synth apps and have worked in the music industry. Looking at the app and the way they reacted to not getting approved made me upset.
An Alt iOS store isn't accessible to everyone in every country either as far as I know.
Is entitlement always a problem? Maybe if apple didn't try their best to hold a monopoly on app distribution for a large percentage of the mobile userbase, developers wouldn't feel frustrated in this regard. Who's apple to decide which apps aren't allowed because they "duplicate existing apps", and how fairly is that even applied? Are calculators allowed on the app store? It seems awfully like they duplicate existing functionality.
Ok but now explain why there are tons of absolute trash vibe coded apps that barely do anything in the app store?
First, I am not trusting them at face value. They are building a copycat of Serum and most likely could be doing some level of vibe-coding themselves.
Second, to your point, say we trusted them, it's a chicken or the egg problem. After all the trash entered the space it became flagged and a scale/moderation issue.
The larger problem is the bad actors.
I've been waiting about two weeks for the last review for my app, I got one rejection and that took 20 days. It's a bit of a bummer but there isn't anything I can do about it.
Depending what your app is, could you consider distributing privately via TestFlight - or even making it a web app?
Doesn't apply to alllll apps - but flagging it in case you hadn't recently looked into it.. web apps can do a lot and don't charge 15%.
Have just submitted two new apps last week and they’ve been published 2 days later. Updated them a couple of times this week and that also took around 2 days.
Not sure if it’s because I have a good track record but I only had been rejected a couple of times and even then I just had to submit a screen recording of me playing with the app to make it pass the review process.
I'm not sure what Apple can do here; Pandora's box is open and it won't be closed. It felt like there was a flood of app releases in the early 2010s during the gold rush. I can't even imagine it now.
I noticed that Apple has been updating their documentation so developers can have less back and forth when releasing an app.
Apple has anti-spam app policies that basically limit innovation and competition in certain product categories. An extreme example would be Apple not allowing any more "sleep music apps" b/c there is enough in the store.
An investor actually approached me about buying a couple mobile apps I made b/c they are "aged" and don't need to go through the rigorous first-review approval process
> what Apple can do
A lot, they _can_ do almost whatever they want with their own AppStore and own business model. Including making good on the anti-trust lawsuit they've got for a decade around the world and let go of their monopoly.
We shouldn't make it sound like they _have to be_ the bad guys. Even from a business standpoint they're slowly losing the grip on their market and getting back some goodwill wouldn't be a bad thing.
They can hire more reviewers - they say they only have 500, that's the same number they had in 2020 when the Epic judge called them out for it.
And makes around $10,000,000,000 per year off the app store: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/08/appfigures-apple-made-over...
They can absolutely afford to hire more.
They will not. Why would high revenue be a reason to hire more?
They look at margins and they want to optimize them, not use better margins as a reason to pursue smaller margins. Small time indie developers and businesses that earn them less than millions a month in fees are not worth their time. They’re solving this by automating more telemetry, not by hiring more junior and senior reviewers. They don’t want to take a loss on small devs.
Only way they change course is via regulations.
Allow third party app stores.
They are the richest company in the world worth trillions.
You're not sure what they can do?
1) hire more people 2) let people buy apps from wherever they want.
Why do people think rich businesses will spend more? They protect their margins. Companies don’t earn more to spend more of their margin.
Only way to get what we want from Apple is regulation.
I don't think they will spend more. I think they will spend less. The can spend more, is the answer to OP question
> I'm not sure what Apple can do here;
Hire more reviewers. Apple is making a shitload of money from App Store sales (and of course by scamming its users in many creative ways). They'd better spend it on making developers happier, not on thickening the walls of their garden.
They don’t make a shitload off the small apps like the synthesizer from this post. They aren’t going to introduce more expensive Cupertino and Cork reviewers to help that category of dev. They’re a business and will automate instead of have small time earners occupy more time on reviewer desks.
it's not just Apple. Steam game review is now taking weeks due to the amount of AI slop being published, whereas before it was 3-5 days.
I'm not sure how platforms will handle this honestly. Of course they want to curate a bit and avoid blatant malware/spam, though.
Even just internal Steamworks requests are taking 3-5x as long.
In both of these cases the platforms are absurdly profitable, 75% profit margin for Apple, fleet of mega-yachts for Steam, the solution is they stop skimping on review and hire more people to keep up.
$1000 application fee would probably thin the herd.
I am more interested in the fact so many people are spamming the app store. What are they hoping for actually? If you can write a prompt for it, anyone can do it. There's no value in an app like before. I think those times are over.
Maybe the "democratization" of it will bring in fresh ideas. Maybe not. But anyway basically no one will make any money or have any success off these vibe coded apps.
There is a surge of vibe coded apps in the iOS community.
Some of them are good - generally by musicians or sound designers who couldn't code.
Many are utter trash, designed by developers who have barely any musical taste and simply told Claude to make some glitchy reverb pedal or groovebox. They use AI to write the copy for the app store and leave the UI as default (navy with fixed width headers, often looking like more like a spreadsheet than a synth). Sometimes trying to charge as much as $30 for it. It's a scourge but on the upside, most of them have now got their dopamine fix and moved onto something else.
>It was over a month of back-and-forth, so I threw my hands up and released it audio-only for now. What we will do is bundle the MIDI build into the binary so both AUv3s install.
Oh, so they are trying to do a soft bait and switch; where an app developer makes an app, splits its functionality, and sells both on the app store. They hope that someone buys the first app, which is missing basic functionality, not realizing they have to buy a second app to get the additional expected features. Like if you buy a video converter app that doesn't let you convert to an MP4 unless you buy a second "MP4 version" video converter app. Scummy behavior, glad Apple blocked it.
Apple and Google are a mobile cartel, they need to be broken up.
This is absurd.
If people want the editorialized 'safety' of an App Store, they can use it, that's fine, but there's no reason to stop people from buying apps for their phone from wherever they want.
I m waiting for weeks to just enroll in their developer program, that i have paid for. Are they deliberately stalling everything to stop people from putting more stuff in the app store? I m going to go ahead and release the android version and make sure to badmouth apple to their users. life is short
Similar issue with shopify apps
The title is too friendly to Apple. Sure the flood of apps is making their lives harder, but also remember that they choose to force everyone through this and you have to PAY them to do their job this badly.
It's more than that, they choose to do the absolute least they can and pocket immense profits. In 2021 the judge in the Epic case called them out for only having 500 reviewers now it's 2026 and they still only have 500 reviewers.
https://apple.com/app-store
> Every week, nearly 500 dedicated experts around the world review over 130K apps.
And they actually updated that in the middle of last year, it's not just something they forgot it used to say:
> Every week, over 500 dedicated experts around the world review over 100K apps.
HN will continue to buy iPhones and licking the boot. Nothing will change.
In a land of commodified apps, the platform has all the power and the dev has none. Like at this point, they could up their cut to 90% of revenue. There would be an outcry and many devs would leave. But in the end getting even 10% of the revenue of an app you whipped together by telling claude to "make an app, no mistakes" is too good to refuse.
I love how poor the writing in this article is. It gives me hope that not everyone has switched to AI.
> Developing and releasing a VST plugin is simple. You set up a website, upload your installers, set a price, and you’re good to go.
I don't disagree with the critique of Apple's policies, but boy this made me roll my eyes.
A company I'm familiar with had their app rejected for "App does not contain means to delete accounts"
Then all subsequent ones were rejected "Developer provided test account stopped working"
Logs show that the tester used the "delete my account" function..
As the only customer service available is an uncaring LLM, the only solution that worked was to keep the "Delete my account" button in the app, and make it a NOP on the server side.
This is my experience with app review. They’ll flag things as the exact opposite of what they are in reality. It’s like Apple intentionally hired the worst people to randomly gatekeep the App Store.
https://phillipshoemaker.substack.com/p/who-is-actually-revi...
"About 80% of the reviewers on my team were former Apple retail employees. Many were Geniuses, the people who fixed your phone at the store. The other 20% came from elsewhere. They came from bartending, tree trimming, and tech."
"When I was there, a new app got about 13 minutes. An update got about 6. Those 13 minutes cover every localization, every screen, and every purchase described above."
This is why app review is a joke, and why the App Store is full of crap and scams.
According to Shoemaker, Steve Jobs demanded that Apple review every app, but Jobs resigned from Apple only 2.5 years after the App Store opened. More than 15 years later, it's clear that the App Store has outgrown the expectations of the dying Jobs.
I suspect that Jobs would have changed and adapted if he had lived, but Tim Cook seemed content to cash in on the easy App Store revenue.
Apple's app review process has always been a silly game. I have a music playing app, and every actual screenshot gets rejected in review for "displaying copyrighted content" (album art). And the terms of review say the screenshots must come from the app, not be mockups. So dumb. I have a fake music collection of fake artists and albums that I load to generate screenshots ... colossal waste of time.