4.3 Design Guidelines - Apple please reconsider how this is enforced.

I had chats with a few people from the review team.

These are considered to be spams according to the guideline 4.3.

- No similar app is allowed under your account. When they say "similar", it simply means its appearance are alike. Even if targeted users are different, no similar app is allowed. Also they may say "they are made using the same frameworks", it's nothing to do with the frameworks we think. It simply means "they look similar". Even if the two apps are built upon completely diffrent codes (not built from a template), they are categorised as spams if they have similar user interface.

- Releasing a free "Lite" version and a paid version is no longer accepted. Must use in-app purchase in one app instead of releasing an independent paid app. Otherwise they are rejected as spams.

- Releasing upgraded new version as an independent app (like "MY APP" and "MY APP 2") is not allowed. Old version must be removed from the store to release a new app as a different app. Otherwise they are rejected as spams.

This definition of app spamming jives with what I said in another thread -- multiple similar apps from the SAME developer.

We got another app rejected because the app is not compliant with Guideline 4.3

View on App Store

This app displays waveforms of a sound file (typically spoken words), enables users to clip a certain area, make a sound clip playlists, convert it to MP3 using LameMP3 library, etc.

We don't have any similar apps. We believe the store is not saturated with similar apps.

The standard of the guideline 4.3 is getting very strict recently.

My app https://itunes.apple.com/ae/app/fuzzy-the-spider/id1123309651?mt=8

Has been marked as Design Spam. No idea why reveiew just keeps on replying with template reply.

Has anyone considered suing? I would imagine a large number of companies affected would join the suit.

We did this as well. We removed all but one app in our series, submitted it and it was rejected for 4.3.

In our case, we had initially consolidated our series into a container. We removed everything but the container and sold it for one month. The sales as expected were horrible because the marketing suffers terribly and the app icon is super-generic. We've been selling for years and know roughly what to expect for any given week in the app store. The container sold far worse than our series of apps individually. The sales of the container were also worse than our top selling app by itself. So, we decided to discontinue the container and sell only our top seller. This where we are now -- rejected for 4.3 design spam with no other apps like it in the store.

We've only received the 4.3 templated response in the resolution center. Last week we had call with the App Store. We had the impression from the call that this course of action was OK (though they wouldn't say definitively), so we submitted and were rejected. We're appealing now.

If that is the case, how do review team explain the Angry Bird series ? Candy Crush series ? Goal Simulator series? We can find "Monument Valley" and "Monument Valley 2" on Appstore from the same developer. Aren't they spam?

Any idea how I combine a 120mb Chess game with a 60mb Solitaire game and a 40mb Sudoku game? Apperently they are similar (they aren't) and I have many of the same type of app (I don't) and they will call me (they haven't).

The worst part of it all is that they tell you to create a "new" app and add all your other similar apps (that they have arbitrarily marked as spam) into that new app. So what happens to the download & revenue of that new app? Its a complete disastor!

The way apple ranks an app higher in searches that other is by multiple factors and biggest of them are how many users have downloaded the app and how many active devices are using it. If you had an app that was in the app store for 6 years and have had thousand / million of downloads with active users, your only option at this point is to

- either remove your most downloaded app, create a new app and add other apps into it. Whether they belong into that one app/category or not

- OR remove all your other apps they think as spam and keep your most downloaded app active.

This rule is so arbitrary that it sicken me. Most of us got grandfathered into this stupid rule. I want to be clear here, I have never once made an app from a template and written all my apps from scratch. Since app store conception back in 2007 we were told "there's an app for that" and users have been trained that if you need an app for something specific then search for it. We devs created & marked apps for specific tasks. What sense does it make to put a checklist app with an alarm clock app with a checkers game app? Can you imagine if they did this to disney, google or facebook apps? Just look at how many duplicate apps Dinsey has. They won't touch big devs as that will cause a major PR nightmare at national news level. I feel like they purposely targeted small devs that can't do anything about this.

Instead of making their search algorithm better or making app store completly different, they came up with this dumb rule that hey we are not going to allow more apps in the app store. If they don't look at the code, which I believe is BS form them, how in world do they know one app looks / behaves similar to the other? Do they look at the screenshots and determine that?

I believe this is what transpired

- In 2015-2016 I personally saw thousand upon thousand of similar apps being added by fake chineses/russian accounts. Most of them were 99.9% identical

- App approval had become jokingly easy. Remember 1-2 day app reviews which you knew had no human intervention. I know I had submitted some buggy updates that used to crash if they had only launched and clicked the very first button in my app. They didn't and approved updates left & right.

- App approval only took their sweet time on new apps and not the subsiquent app updates. Spammer knew that explotied that loop hole.

- I even saw spammer change app description "after" approvals to some fake description to defraud the users that had nothing to do with the app. Some of these frauds made it big. I personally saw "Minecraft 2" fake app show up twice on the top paid app list right at the Dec appstore shutdown.

- Each of these spammer had mutiple app accounts, if one got closed they would submit the same app through another account.

- If an app got flagged during review for whatever reason then those spammer would just created a new app and submit the same code base again till it went through their approval cracks.

- When they finally figured this out they sent mass developer termination notices in mid 2017. They mapped which dev is using the same credit card to pay for their dev accounts and terminated related accounts to that credit card.

- Instead of punishing just those spam devs and improving their review process, they are now killing anyone with AI robot, which we are training. Once your account is flagged as a spammer, every single update will get rejected automatically not matter what and all your appeals will be ignored.

At this point I cannot update my apps or create new ones. Same template rejection comes up for everything. I have no choice but to either wait out this rule and hope it will change in the next year or two or delete all the apps that weren't selling well and keep the best sellers alive and hopefully that will remove the spam flag.

Good info/summary, thanks for commenting.

All we need now is for Apple to come up with a new policy where dev's aren't billed for a Developer Program account -unless/until- their (bot reviewed) app is approved...

How is this account able to publish same app every 3 days with 50 chars in the app title:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/developer/free-las-vegas-casino-card-games/id1038615411?mt=8

Appannie link:

https://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/publisher/1038615411/

Sally, it sounds like Apple is forcing you to remove Apps that customers have paid for, without giving the end user any kind of recourse for recovery. Has Apple Review ever suggested to any of us an easy way to get the customer back what they paid for?? Instead they are twisting your arm to commit consumer fraud. Of course the end user will just think that YOU the developer took the app off the shelf and moved it somewhere else to sell under a different name. Us developers need to be the last line of defense against hundreds of thousands of products being removed. How many millions of consumers are losing access forever to products or in-app purchases they just paid for? This feels like an FTC issue. How is this not widespread consumer fraud?

I clicked a few titles. Couldn't find a 2018 copyright. A lot of 2015's and found a 2017. Maybe they haven't gotten their consolidation phone call yet.

that is why I had given Appannie link where we can see the release date of the app. Even though copyright is 2017 but release date is this month and its same app so many times. 4.3 is being torn apart by this guy but how?

http://prntscr.com/jemzzd

I have loyal users of many years. Not many, but they have supported Apple's products for many years.

Apple just keep on damaging user experience by rejecting the updates because of guideline 4.3.

I have to explain to users that I can't update our productivity apps because Apple just don't allow updates even though the updates are ready to be released only if Apple allow to do so.

The apps are keeps on crashing on users' phone and users are unable to access their data accumulated on their phone for several years.

I don't understand why Apple keep on damaging tthier reputation by donig this.

I am not being harrassed by Apple, but users are.

Those of us without an AppAnnie account couldn't see the link. Maybe the release dates are updates? He might be trying to consolidate apps and got a reprieve from the 4.3 requirements for updates

Latest app (for example) is a new publication

https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1174853370

Everyone, lets remember to be proactive on this. Yes, its frustrating, but we need to really insist they give us the right tools to consolidate. Someone "upstairs" is telling Apple Review to insist we do this, so they have their marching orders, so to speak. And as someone is pointing out, they are willing to look at things on a case-by-case basis.

But I think Apple and us devs absolutely have to remember to do what's best for the end-users in all this. Apple has many protections in place for the end-user already. Restore Purchase buttons are required for a reason. If a user pays for a 1-year subscriptions that must be honored.

What I'm getting at is I don't think Apple Review wants to trigger what some lawyer could claim is widespread consumer fraud by removing paid apps (or apps with paid content). Look at the frivilous stuff Apple gets sued for already. Right now in France there's a developer suing Apple for unfair practices. Also we shouldn't be forced to exporse ourselves to something like that too.

So if consolidation is the future of things. We need the tools to protect ourselves.

1. A redirect from the removed app to the consolidated app. So for example, in iTunes Connect if we have to mark an app as Removed from Sale, it should have a simple field for the Apple ID of the new app.

2. The consoldiated app must be able to use StoreKit to query the removed app to check if (A) it was a purchased app or (B) if it had in-app purchases.

That way we can reliably get customers the content they paid for. Every store user has an expectation that their content will stay available for years to come. I'm sure theres some Terms of Use thing when buying in the Store that says "there's no guarantees you can access this forever" to protect Apple (and us). But that shouldn't be used as a means to purge unnecessarily.

I have a lot of Sticker apps that have sold well, and I don't mind consolidating them, but I can't just rip off people by removing the apps altogether.

So file a bug report asking for the above. It won't take long, and it lets the engineers know we need the right tools.

See my most recent post below. Lets ask for the right tools to consolidate.

I agree bro, this is terrible, apps are going to have some similarites between them, there are thousands of apps on the App Store, how can each one be different from another, its not possible.

Who cares. Grab your ball and go home. Apple need not indie developers making mediocre apps.

Excellent points raised. I believe that the problem with 4.3 rule is that Apple does not evaluate at what point the difference in content justifies the existence of a separate app.

We are developing theory test apps for the UK market and were contacted last year demanding some consolidation. We've been able to resolve it with Apple by removing all our paid apps from sale and instead using in-app purchases. I thought that it was a great solution as it indeed reduced the number of apps while allowing us to keep one app per each vehicle category (Car, Motorcycle, etc.) Recently, we've been contacted by App Review, and they now demand that we make further consolidations.

From a marketing point of view, further consolidation makes no sense. Users are accustomed to seeing learning materials being separated by a vehicle category and would be puzzled if such a real-life model did not exist on the App Store. Imagine if you search for Motorcycle Theory Test and all you see are a list of Driving Theory Tests.

The irony of all of this is that while we reduced the number of our apps last year, most of our competitors did not. We've recently conducted an analysis which indicates that if all our competitors were to move to the same model which we have, there'd be 50 fewer theory test apps on the App Store. From our point of view, it would be fair if App Review first ensured that everyone uses the same model with a reduced number of apps. Then, further reevaluation can be conducted on whether some additional consolidation is possible/needed. In our opinion, it would not be needed as setting cars aside; there are at most ten companies shipping apps for other vehicle categories. If all of them release only one app with in-app purchases, it is hard to call ten apps a "clutter".

Hence, we agree that Apple needs to modify rule 4.3. At the moment it says that as long as the variation is only in the content or language, the apps should be consolidated. Instead, they should take the importance of content into account when deciding whether it makes sense to perform consolidation.

Otherwise, it seems like the App Review is forcing us to participate in some programming exercise with no benefit to users, us or Apple.

I completely agree, there should be the possibility of grouping app by category. It is not a technical issue but a marketing issue, and sadly not everywhere in the world the american approach works.

Furthermore I would really, really sometime appreciate the possibility of talking to somebody who is in charge at the app review team, i.e. the person(s) who decide these policies.

Any progress so far? I am in the same boat. My idea was also to publish these types of games, but of course making them different enough with existing apps. My second game got the 4.3 rejection. Both games are completely different in terms of ui design and gameplay, but use the same base code. Which I believe why is was rejected.