Iris Rejected From the App Store
Rejected after six days waiting for review, and four minutes after launching the app for the first time.
The app uses one or more entitlements which do not appear to have matching functionality within the app.
com.apple.security.network.server
I guess they never opened the Settings window during all the time they spent reviewing the app?
App Review rejected Iris for a second time, this time for two reasons.
They again claimed the app uses the com.apple.security.network.server entitlement without matching functionality - even though I responded to the first rejection with an annotated screenshot and detailed explanation showing the server feature in the app.
They asked for more information about how Iris uses face recognition data - asking me to quote from my privacy policy - despite both the privacy policy and the app itself explaining that no data (including face data) ever leaves your Mac and all processing happens entirely on-device.
Ironically, their rejection included a screenshot of Iris’s Settings window—showing the Privacy tab that explains exactly this.
My MAS app used to go through in under an hour, now takes close to a week.
And there’s a big difference between waiting a week to be approved vs. waiting a week just to begin the process of arguing over specious violations.
I’ve always found it odd that Apple appears to be bragging about these statistics, yet if you do the math, the statistics turn out to be somewhat embarrassing. Based on the 2024 numbers, over 130K app submissions every week reviewed by nearly (in other words, fewer than) 500 “dedicated experts” (a characterization I would question) means 260 reviews per week on average by each reviewer. If we assume, extremely generously, that 500 reviewers work 40 hours every week with no meetings, no training, no breaks, and no vacations, that leaves less than 10 minutes of review time on average for each submission.
[…]
You might ask why Apple, the most profitable corporation in history, with a 77% gross margin in “services” revenue, that could obviously afford to hire more app reviewers, doesn’t also hire better reviewers, more qualified, actual experts in app development and the market? The answer to my rhetorical question is that app reviewer is an unpleasant job, mostly mindless rule-following, repetitive, facing constant deadlines, reminiscent of assembly-line work. It’s a virtual assembly line.
[…]
It isn’t intended to be true curation, and thus, by no surprise, it isn’t true curation. From Apple’s perspective, adding more reviewers would just add to their costs without adding to their profits, which is the point of the App Store, and reviewers were never particularly good at stopping scams, so the investment in more inescapably low-skill reviewers wouldn’t necessarily bring substantial returns. I’m sure that Apple wants to avoid the embarrassment of scams in the store, but Apple can’t do that without fundamentally changing the nature of the App Store and software distribution on iOS, so they live with the embarrassment and rely on Apple apologists to hand-wave away the problem as “a few bad apples.”
Previously:
- Inkwell Rejected From the App Store
- Apple’s Q2 2026 Results
- The App Store Scammer Strikes Back
- Small Ways the App Store Could Be Improved for Developers
- Mac App Store Review Times Increasing
Update (2026-05-26): Richard Buckle:
This perfectly encapsulates why I no longer develop for Apple platforms.
I also got this rejection for my app Localmost…which is a local web server manager!
one of my apps was submitted and approved, but the first update I pushed was rejected because they wanted “test account details” to which i replied “the app does not have an account system” and then it was approved. it’s just so amateur hour. AND they still haven’t got me on the 15% track, the email said “sorry we’re busy right now so there are delays”
Our app resembles a marketplace, so we are always worried of reviewers being overzealous. We had to deal with a few rejections in the early versions. Also, we publish some apps with the branding and name of some big companies (think intellectual property red flags). What seems to work (maybe it is pure chance ?!) is that we provide a nice QA anticipating possible critiques in the Notes section next to the login/password.
I had the (unfortunate) opportunity of submitting 3 updates to MAS for @due in 4 days and want to provide another data point[…] Even before this week, my experience has been similarly speedy. But of course, the trouble with the App Store is that you never know when you’re on the unlucky side of things.
