app store rejections are quietly killing vibe coded apps, anyone else seeing this?
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I’ve been building in the react native ecosystem for years (nativebase, gluestack) and lately im noticing a pattern. people generate a working app with AI over a weekend then get stuck for weeks at submission
Apple enforcing guideline 2.5.2, provisioning profiles, metadata rejections, the minimum functionality flag... the last mile just hasnt caught up with how fast the first mile got
few questions for folks here
if you’ve shipped an AI built app to the app store or play store how did review go
what got you rejected and how long did resubmission take
should the stores change how they review AI generated apps or is the friction actually a useful quality filter
genuinely curious where people are getting stuck....
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So true!
High time, SLOP is not published!
@gracey_dugar wait until tomorrow 😅
i've always felt like there's a missing piece between building an app with ai and actually getting it published on the app store as i was not confident about the process to do it my own. tools like capacitor make it possible to wrap apps, but getting a truly native app experience and handling the whole publishing process is still a challenge.
i'm really glad we're working on solving this and i'm genuinely happy to be a part of it @sanketsahu
@famitha glad to have you on this journey too
seen this so many times. the app works fine, then it gets rejected for small stuff like no demo login for the reviewer or no delete account option. ai builds the app but nobody tells you the store rules
@rdsouza sometimes decoding an apple rejection email feels harder than debugging the actual app lol 😂
Honestly, building the app is the easy part these days. Getting it approved by Apple is another story 😅 You fix one issue, resubmit, and somehow end up with a new rejection. And sometimes the feedback is so vague that you’re left wondering what they actually want. A little more clarity from Apple would save developers a lot of time and frustration.
is a reviewer-ready demo account the thing people most often miss, or are minimum-functionality rejections still the bigger hurdle?
The agent ran the submission checklist and reported that the in-app purchases were fully wired. Apple rejected the binary within hours because the agent had just stubbed the restore flow with a hardcoded return, all while reporting that everything was tested and fine.
One that catches web-to-app wrappers specifically is payments. If the web version takes cards through a normal checkout, the stores expect purchases of digital goods inside the app to go through their own billing system, so a wrapped app with the web checkout left in is a rejection waiting to happen. We treated that as a design constraint from the start instead of something to patch after review. To Neeraj's question, I'd guess the reviewer demo account is the most common miss, but payments and account deletion are the two that force real rework rather than a quick resubmit.
Shipping a native Mac + iOS app with subscriptions, the UI was never the slow part. The edges were: restore purchases, server-side receipt validation, account deletion, Sign in with Apple, and a way for the reviewer to get past login. AI is great at the happy path and quietly skips exactly those. I'd keep the friction, but rejection notes that point to the exact screen would save everyone a lot of back and forth.
Adding the Android side, since nobody has mentioned it: mine is a PWA, and for Play I wrap it as a Trusted Web Activity instead of going native. Same web app, full screen, works offline.
The payments part Tomer brought up is the bit that bites, though. Play doesn't allow other payment systems in the app, so in the Play build I don't show the checkout at all, just a line saying plans can't be bought there. People who already support it sign in and their plan still works.
Way less for a reviewer to reject. Has anyone tried the same route for iOS, or is the App Store still wrapper-hostile?
Yeah this is what I've just got after 12 days wait time... It was written from scratch by me(Opus)in Swift 6 with SpriteKit and SwiftUI. It was intentionally built from scratch with directive to fit apple's stated app requirements.
Super discouraging, I was hoping I could get this out for my family and friends to use instead of the cluttered app's that are out there already. Too many ads, just give us the game!