Hi everyone,
Honestly im not sure what else to do anymore, so im posting here hoping someone can help 😞
We are a small team, just few of us, working on our first iOS app. It's a VPN app for Chinese people living overseas who need a stable connection back to services in mainland China. We put everything we have into this. Our Android version is already live and makes a little money, but not even close to enough to keep the team going. Without iOS, we really don't know how long we can keep going.
We first submitted on July 17. Since then we got rejected under 4.3(a) again and again, always the same message: the app "shares a similar binary, metadata, and/or concept as apps submitted to the App Store by other developers."
We took it very serious. We had a call with App Review on August 20, and we really hoped that would clear things up. But on the call we just heard the same three words again: binary, metadata, concept. I literally dream about these three words now.
Binary: our first version used 【Xray-core】, so we thought that was the problem. We removed it completly and replaced it with our own networking engine. We changed so much code, it's all our own now.
UI and metadata: we redesigned the UI more times than I can count, rewrote the description and keywords, and redid the screenshots again and again 😅
Concept: this is the one that really confuses me. What does "concept" actually mean here? We built a lot of things for our users, like dedicated carrier lines and separate optimized routes for games and AI. What else can we do?
Every time we think "ok, this time must be it". And every time the same rejection comes back.
Last week we recieved the exact same message again: "The issues we previously identified still need your attention." After everything we changed, it feels like nothing we do even matters. This time it also came with an Extended Review warning, which honestly scares us alot. Even our latest TestFlight build got rejected. We already replied in App Store Connect and we wont resubmit until we understand what's wrong.
The users who tried our app really like it, and that's the hardest part. We know people want it, we just can't get it to them 💔
Some days we honestly think about giving up on iOS. But we don't want to give up yet. If you have been through something like this, especially with a VPN or Network Extension app, I would really love to hear from you:
- How did you make your "concept" different enough? What did Apple actually accept?
- Is there something else in the binary we should check, like some common SDK?
- Should we keep waiting, book a Meet with Apple appointment, or file an appeal?
And if anyone from App Review sees this: we are not trying to game anything. We just want to know what to fix. Even one sentence of real direction would mean so much to us.
Thanks for reading 🙏