What to write back when App Review rejects you
Paste the notice. A few seconds later you’ve got the opening paragraph of an appeal written against the guideline they cited, free. The whole letter’s $29 CAD.
Most of the work in an appeal is working out which rejection you actually got. A 4.3 might be the duplicate-app call, or it might be the spam-catalogue clause, and those want completely different letters — the second one often isn’t really about the app the reviewer had open, it’s about the other eleven sitting under the same developer account, which is why answering it app-by-app tends to go nowhere. A 2.1 is harder to guess at. Crash, a demo account they couldn’t get past, a purchase that didn’t go through. The notice gives you the number and stops.
Built only from your paste.
What moves this one
The whole letter, $29 CAD
Stripe takes the payment. The letter is on the next page the moment it clears, and it stays at a private link. There are no accounts, so bookmark that link.
I’m not a lawyer and I’ve got no contact inside App Review. Some rejections are right. The free read says when it thinks yours is.
Sample
App: Mango Reader. Submission 1.0.7, build 142. Rejected 12 May under Guideline 4.3(a).
The rejection reads: "Your app duplicates the content and functionality of other apps submitted to the App Store."
Mango Reader is the only build we have submitted under this or any other account. It reads EPUB files the user already has on their device and re-flows them for a two-column iPad layout, with a per-paragraph translation pane that calls our own alignment service. The parser, the layout engine and the translation pane are ours; there is no template or app generator behind this build.
Two things in the test pass may have read as generic. The sample library ships with three public-domain books, so the first screen after launch looks like every other reader until a file is imported. The translation pane is behind a long-press, which the review notes suggest was never opened.
To see the part that is not duplicated: launch, open the sample "Kafka, Die Verwandlung", long-press any paragraph. The pane that appears is the feature the app exists for.
We are asking the Board to review build 142 against 4.3(a) with that path in mind. If it still reads as a duplicate we would rather hear which app it duplicates, so we can address it in the next build instead of guessing.
Mango Reader isn’t real. The sample is here so you can see how long the letter runs before you spend anything.
Rather sort it out yourself? The guideline write-ups are free and go through what each citation covers.
