App review stuck in "Waiting for..." for several weeks

I'm posting this here because sources say that Apple personnel have been peeking in here and I hope that's true, and can provide some guidance.

There's no "peeking". There are several Apple developer support engineers who openly, and regularly, respond to technical questions here in these forums.

However, they only provide technical assistance. They aren't App Review and they make a point to avoid any and all App Review questions.

There are a very small number of replies from App Review here in the forums. Those replies are always virtually content free because doing anything more than that would be privacy infringement.

Just because so many developers beg to have their failures discussed in an open forum doesn't mean that Apple should oblige them.

I've got an app that was rejected for "Guideline 4.3(a) - Design - Spam". It isn't. It really isn't. It's not an ad generator. It's not a PII collector, etc. It's a legit application.

That's what they all say. No, seriously. All Spam rejections say that.

I found a process to upgrade it to expedited at least a week ago, and did that.

Yes. They all do that. Seriously, they all do. And by any reasonable point of view, there's no way to provide any kind of "expedited" review when so many people have requested it.

I'd love some guidance, even if that means sitting on a phone call on hold for a while in a queue or something. Any reasonable suggestions? Thanks!

Apple does have "Meet with Apple" sessions directly with App Review. Apple also has an appeals process for app and developer account rejections. And there are direct developer support requests. You've already found the developer forum.

But to get back to my primary point here - all spam rejections take all of those paths. So no matter what that "something" might be that you want to try, you're going to have to wait in a queue of all the other 4.3 spam rejections. And if you look at Apple's published App Store Transparency Reports, you'll see that the spam rejection queue is over 1,100 rejections - per day.

Well, it's not spam, it's not any of that, it's a legit health-care/health-data system, so it's queued incorrectly. :(

I guess I'll wait.

Well, it's not spam, it's not any of that, it's a legit health-care/health-data system, so it's queued incorrectly.

Sorry, I was just making a statistical point. I don't know anything about how Apple runs its internal review queues. Obviously there is some "expedited" process. I was simply making the observation that if every rejection results in a an expedited review request, then, at some point, the "expedited" queue becomes longer than the "normal" queue.

If you feel your app has been incorrectly categorized as spam, then I don't see how an expedited review would solve that problem. Perhaps it will only "expedite" another rejection and termination of your developer account.

There are other avenues available to help you clarify your app's behaviour with App Review, and I've listed those.

@Etresoft - I left a descriptive note and a reply to the rejection; hoping an actual human reads it. I guess I'm thinking if that's the mechanism most easily afforded us (developers, submitters), then they should be pretty proactive about looking at those responses. ** shrug **

Here's hoping.

Thanks for the info.

My company is already talking about scrapping the app(s) (or at least back-burner-ing them) and just going with a site for everything to alleviate this crap in the future. Ultimately, it's my call to make (I'm the head of tech, but still report to people who are very much hands on). The idea of just another website, emitting just another attack vector, with just another bundle of common-denominator crap functionality, and a "looks like every other site" visual presence makes me queasy.

The idea of websites being the primary use surface in 2026 just feels... I dunno... give-ey-up-ey. I dunno.

I left a descriptive note and a reply to the rejection; hoping an actual human reads it. I guess I'm thinking if that's the mechanism most easily afforded us (developers, submitters), then they should be pretty proactive about looking at those responses.

I don't know. You were rejected under the spam category. That's a policy rejection, not a technical rejection.

If you click on that link to the 2025 Transparency report, you'll see that Apple gets 25,000 submissions a day. And that was before AI slop.

You've already been classified as spam, so they might not spend any more time on it. I get spam too. Maybe those are real investment opportunities, but I doubt it. I'm not going to spend any more time than it takes to click the spam button.

I've already mentioned the other contact mechanisms provided to developers, this is the 3rd time now. If you've got "hands on" people, then maybe they would like to do a zoom call with App Review to discuss the situation.