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
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2 weeks from now we'll hear "We can't wait to see what you do!" and I'll think about rejections like these and try to find reasons to stay on the platform.
I had an app rejection for using NSApplication .presentationOptions after I'd been using it for years. "Nonstandard UI" or some dumb note. I had to explain users requested it.
I had another app rejection because exactly one NSTextField in an app with probably 100 of them over 10 xibs mistakenly didn't use .labelColor or a semantic color for Dark Mode. A UI mistake for sure, but nothing as bad as Liquid Ass (and that didn't hold up Apple from releasing).
Meanwhile, if you work for a ShitterCo or a Mag 7 (same thing), your 500 MB Electron filth, with 5 different analytics frameworks for maximum fingerprinting, gets auto-approved by Apple's reviewers every 3 hours you add a new JS dependency. Truly a showcase of the best of the platform.
"Meanwhile, if you work for a ShitterCo or a Mag 7 (same thing), your 500 MB Electron filth, with 5 different analytics frameworks for maximum fingerprinting, gets auto-approved by Apple's reviewers every 3 hours you add a new JS dependency"
I actually find this genuinely confusing. I'm guessing stuff like the flagged network.server entitlement, presentationOptions, or missing labelColor is detected programmatically, and bad actors are just good at submitting apps that don't trigger any of these automatic rules?
Because I just can't believe that a human reviewer notices a missing labelColor in one app, and then completely blanks on a scam app.
