My app is a retro game emulator. It was approved, ran on the App Store through several updates, and then got rejected as design spam. Why? Good question. Resolution Center answers with a template listing every possible cause: maybe the metadata, maybe an embedded binary, maybe I bought an app template, maybe the concept already exists on the App Store. Pick whichever one you like best.
When I got that list, I assumed I needed to defend the concept. I recorded ten minutes of video showing myself using the app by hand, added test materials, descriptions, and a letter explaining everything. I got the same list back.
Later I thought the cause might be the PSP emulation core — I was using an existing one, because my own wasn't finished yet. I rebuilt, resubmitted, explained. Waited two weeks, requested an expedited review. No email, no confirmation, no denial. Nothing.
A week after that, I received a message from review saying the app appears to hide functionality during review. It does not. There are no feature flags, nothing of the kind. There are no dark patterns in the monetization either — no close buttons you can't hit, no trial tricks, nothing of that sort. What exactly they believed was hidden — guess for yourself.
Resubmitted again. Design spam again, with the same list of possible causes. But you can't keep guessing forever. So I wrote to support — there is a dedicated form for requesting the specific reason for a rejection. I have been waiting for weeks. No confirmation that my request was received, no denial, no explanation. Nothing.
I filed a separate appeal. Again: no confirmation, no denial, nothing at all. Weeks of silence.
Meanwhile the app is still live on the App Store, getting thousands of downloads, people are paying for it, and it has bugs I cannot fix because I cannot ship an update. Users hit those bugs, leave bad reviews and low ratings over them, and the rating keeps dropping.
I also want to talk about the "concept" item in the design spam list.
Where is the line between an app that copies an existing feature on the App Store, and one that improves on what exists?
Are there emulators on the App Store? Of course. Are they good? Not really. In my most recent testing, my own core reduced CPU/GPU load by up to 40% compared to emulators still running third-party code. I won't even get into UI quality, because the user reviews speak for themselves. People point out bugs and still leave five stars because of the UX.
Does that mean I copied something, or that I improved on it? And on top of that, I didn't copy anything — the emulation core is my own.
I know App Review has a huge amount of work right now. But why should that affect support this badly? As a paying member of this program for years, this looks like a completely broken process with no transparency at all.
People on these forums say that after a design spam rejection your app goes into some different review queue. But even if that's true — why is that my problem? I have no alert about it, no notification of any kind, and no reason to be ignored for months.
Let's be honest. Design spam is bad, no question. But it is a rejection like any other. You tell me what's wrong, I fix it, you re-check. Please don't turn "design spam" into a mark that makes developers want to give up and stop trying entirely.
App ID: 6790321094
Submission ID: 883d7004-33a3-4fd7-b229-756a15b51cb9