The App Store Review Process Is Operationally Broken

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Apple is a multi-trillion-dollar company, yet dealing with its developer ecosystem can feel astonishingly dysfunctional.

I’ve spent weeks trying to get a straightforward app through review. I’ve opened multiple support cases, requested escalation, gone through expedited review, provided demo accounts, recordings, documentation, and answered repeated follow-up requests.

The problem isn’t that Apple identified one clear issue and asked me to fix it. The problem is that the process keeps surfacing one new request at a time, days apart, with no apparent ownership of the overall case and no meaningful way to reach someone who can actually resolve it.

I can’t get a clear answer. I can’t get a complete review. I can’t get someone to take responsibility for the process. Meanwhile, every additional delay costs real money and blocks an actual business from launching.

Apple has extraordinary resources. There is no reason the developer experience should be this opaque, fragmented, and inefficient.

At some point, “review” stops being quality control and starts becoming a bottleneck that developers have no practical way to navigate.

Answer 1

Etresoft OP

4h

no apparent ownership of the overall case

There is no ownership or "client" system on Apple's side. There's no way to tell which reviewer you will get. So if you're trying something that needs a lot of explanation, it's better to re-work the idea so that it's more clear to anyone who might encounter it.

no meaningful way to reach someone who can actually resolve it.

As the developer, it's your responsibility to resolve it.

I can’t get a complete review.

There's no such thing as a complete review. Apple reviews 15,000 submissions every day. Once there's a reason to reject, Apple doesn't spend any more time on it.

In an educational setting, a low-quality paper takes forever to mark because there's so much to identify, correct, and total. Work that's done well earns a high score and is really fast to do. But Apple operates on a pass/fail basis. Once they've decided that you fail, they're going to spend their time on other submissions that have a chance of passing.

At some point, “review” stops being quality control

App Review has never been about quality control. It's about customer safety, legal issues, blocking scams, and contractual requirements.