Submission ID: 4f64fd8d-529d-4829-9f29-07bbc53b3afb · Review date: August 26, 2026 · Version 1.0 (47)
I never wanted to build a dating app.
I wanted to build the thing I couldn't find: a place where you say what you're actually looking for, a partner, a friend, someone to travel with, people for a Tuesday-night board game, and see the people who are looking for the same thing. Not a deck of strangers dealt to me by an algorithm that profits from dealing slowly.
My name is Gleb and for the past 13 months, in Barcelona, with my partner, who did the art direction, I built Tekero. No investors. No revenue. Nothing to monetize. I haven't built a paywall, because the first thing I'd have to sell is the thing every other app sells: your loneliness, rationed back to you.
Here's what's different, and why it's different:
Every mechanic in Tekero is aimed at a specific thing that hurts people.
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Ghosting: if you're sitting on a pile of likes you haven't answered, you drop out of the feed. Why should you be shown to more people when you're not responding to the ones you have?
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Inbox overload: your active chats are capped. Want a new conversation? Finish an old one, or keep it deliberately by adding that person as a friend. The app only unlocks that once you've built up friendship progress, a separate feature that measures how much two people (or more, in a group chat) have actually said to each other.
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Pay-to-reveal-likes: gone. Every like arrives openly, immediately, free. No slot machine.
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Both sides filter each other, the person who posted the announcement and the person browsing. So anything you see in the feed is someone who was also looking for you.
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Couples and friends can browse together and post together, because meeting people doesn't stop being useful once you've met someone.
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There's a trust score that costs you points for treating people badly: ignoring them, being toxic, attempting screenshots of private data (chat messages or private photos). It gives you points for treating people well, for communicating, for making friends. Screenshotting a private photo isn't a clever move here: it saves a black frame, sends a notification to the person you betrayed, and raises a ticket on the reports desk, which can lead to a block if the trust score is already low.
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The blank first message: most apps hand you a stranger and a cursor. Tekero gives you openers, including one called Game, where you both answer three psychological questions and start from something real instead of "hey". The first exchange is designed to be worth having, not to be survived.
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The dropdown that doesn't fit you: most apps give you two options and call it a profile. Tekero gives you 72 non-binary gender identities alongside the binary ones, the full range of orientations rather than the four everyone ships, and gender expression as a separate field: feminine, masculine or androgynous. How you present isn't the same question as who you are. This isn't a diversity checkbox. The whole app runs on both sides filtering each other honestly, and filtering can only be as true as the vocabulary people are given to describe themselves. Precision here isn't decoration, it's what makes the matching real. In Tekero, we want everyone to be themselves.
I gave it to testers. It's hard to recruit them while the app is TestFlight-only, people aren't keen on multi-step installs. Still, apart from minor improvement requests that I resolved as they came in, testers were genuinely excited about the mechanics. The two things I heard most often:
Tekero reinvents dating
and
It's not just dating
AppStore Connect Submission
Last week Apple rejected it under Guideline 4.3(b): my app "primarily includes dating features that duplicate the content and functionality of similar apps that are already widely available," and "there are already enough of these apps on the App Store."
The same letter also states that my app "may include features or characteristics that distinguish it." Taken together, those two statements suggest the distinguishing features weren't assessed against the standard, and that assessment is what I'm asking for.
In June, Apple rewrote that guideline to name dating outright: no new submissions unless they offer a "meaningfully different or improved experience." That test has two limbs, and the second one is "improved". Tekero isn't a variant of what's already there. Every mechanic above exists because something in the current experience is failing the people using it. I'm not asking for an exemption from the rule. I'm asking for the half of it that says "improved."
What's next
The appeal is with the Review Board.
Get familiar with Tekero here, if interested: tekero.io, there's a walkthrough video on the site (posting the address as plain text, since external links aren't permitted here).
If you've gotten out from under 4.3(b) — I'd really like to know how.