Hello,
Our app, Purge: Meet Tonight (iOS), has been rejected four times under Guideline 4.3(b) as being "similar to existing dating apps." We submitted an appeal to the App Review Board on October 5 and have not yet received a response or any confirmation of receipt.
We would like to respectfully point out that the problems 4.3(b) targets in the dating category are the very problems our app was built to solve:
- Dead profiles and accounts abandoned months ago: Structurally impossible in our app — everything resets every night at 3:00 AM, and the only way to return to the feed on a new day is to take a new selfie. Yesterday's selfie is not valid today; visibility must be re-earned every single day. The concept of a "ghost account created five months ago" cannot exist.
- Photos altered with FaceApp or AI tools to misrepresent who you are: The only photo source is the camera, captured in the moment. Uploading from the photo library is not possible — the app has no gallery access at all. There is no path for an edited or old photo to enter the system.
- Endless swiping and spam interactions: A limit of 8 replies per day and hourly rounds of 12 profiles push users toward selectivity instead of volume.
The entire flow is built on these principles: if users want to appear in the feed and socialize that day, they take an in-app selfie and write a status about what they are doing right now. Other users reply to that status; when a reply is mutual, a match and conversation begin. Everyone in the feed is a real person who has proven they showed up today, and every connection is formed by two people actually writing to each other — there is no passive like-collecting and no swiping mechanic.
We believe our app has been evaluated as a standard dating template, when in fact its architecture is itself an answer to the well-known problems of this category. We would greatly appreciate this distinction being taken into account in the review.
Our questions: How can we confirm that our Board appeal has been received, and what is the right channel to communicate these structural differences to the review team?
Submission ID: 1f842491-426f-4d3c-a289-dd6657d7fbe7
Thank you.