As a game studio with real business commitments, we depend on a predictable App Review process. Every month, we publish updates, run user acquisition campaigns, and test new ideas; that’s how our business operates. It’s not optional. We have obligations to our partners, our marketing budgets are committed in advance, and our entire monthly rhythm depends on getting builds out on schedule.
Right now, Apple’s App Review is making that impossible.
For the past 30 days, we’ve been stuck in a rejection loop on a single submission. Here’s what the cycle looks like:
• Apple rejects our build with vague, generic feedback that doesn’t actually identify what’s wrong.
• We investigate every possible scenario that could conceivably match their description, fix what we believe is the issue, and resubmit, usually within three hours.
• Then we wait. And wait. Each review of the resubmission takes more than ten days.
Read that again: we respond in 3 hours, they respond in 2 weeks.
This isn’t a one-off. It’s been three full cycles now, and we still don’t have clarity on what they actually want changed. The rejection notes are so shallow that we’re forced to guess; patch a plausible cause, ship it, and hope. It honestly feels like reviews are being triaged by AI models that aren’t ready for the job yet: surface-level pattern matching, no real engagement with the build, no specifics we can act on.
Meanwhile, the cost is real:
• UA campaigns we’ve already committed budget to are bleeding out.
• Partner deliverables are slipping.
• Our team’s monthly release rhythm — the engine of how we operate as a business — is broken.
• We’re paying engineers to play guessing games with a reviewer who won’t tell us what’s wrong.
We’ve escalated everywhere we can. Contact forms, appeals, developer support, every channel Apple offers. Nothing has moved.
We love the platform. We want to keep shipping great games on iOS. But Apple needs to understand that App Review isn’t just a gatekeeping checkbox, it’s a load-bearing piece of every developer’s business operation. When a single rejection cycle eats 10+ days and the feedback isn’t actionable, you’re not protecting users. You’re breaking the businesses building for your platform.
Two things need to change, urgently:
1. Restore meaningful, specific rejection feedback. Tell us exactly what’s wrong, with reproduction steps. If a human reviewer can’t be specific, an AI definitely shouldn’t be making the call.
2. Prioritize resubmissions on an in-flight review. A 10-day turnaround on a fix to a rejection you issued, three hours earlier, is indefensible. These should jump the queue, not start at the back.
If anyone at Apple is reading this: we’re trying to work with you. Please help us help you.
Want me to tighten it, make it angrier, soften it, or pull out the bullet lists so it reads as straight prose for the forum?