AI is turning Apple's app review process into a nightmare for synth developers

> My app was REJECTED from submission FOUR TIMES in row. Always same reason (eg. my app is “design spam” and “duplicates existing apps” and it is createed using “app generation template services”) as shown bellow in screenshots. Which is obvious nonsense.

You can feel the entitlement across the room from the developer. They seem to be unable to conceive that outside of their bubble there can be a real case of AI spamming that same look and feel, even if they did it by heart.

Looking at his work, it's clearly modelled after Serum (which even the article describes as "a sort of Serum 2 for iOS") so I am not sure why they think this suddenly deserves a white glove service here.

The App Store is also flooded with Synth apps, so regardless of the UI being the trigger here, I would imagine the category itself has been flagged as spammy and now has a higher bar of entry.

If anything I would use this as an opportunity to reskin and try to stand out, they're giving you a blueprint of what will perform better on the algorithm if you avoid that look if you think about it.

Or just try an Alt Store.

I've been waiting about two weeks for the last review for my app, I got one rejection and that took 20 days. It's a bit of a bummer but there isn't anything I can do about it.

Have just submitted two new apps last week and they’ve been published 2 days later. Updated them a couple of times this week and that also took around 2 days.

Not sure if it’s because I have a good track record but I only had been rejected a couple of times and even then I just had to submit a screen recording of me playing with the app to make it pass the review process.

I'm not sure what Apple can do here; Pandora's box is open and it won't be closed. It felt like there was a flood of app releases in the early 2010s during the gold rush. I can't even imagine it now.

I am more interested in the fact so many people are spamming the app store. What are they hoping for actually? If you can write a prompt for it, anyone can do it. There's no value in an app like before. I think those times are over.

Maybe the "democratization" of it will bring in fresh ideas. Maybe not. But anyway basically no one will make any money or have any success off these vibe coded apps.

>It was over a month of back-and-forth, so I threw my hands up and released it audio-only for now. What we will do is bundle the MIDI build into the binary so both AUv3s install.

Oh, so they are trying to do a soft bait and switch; where an app developer makes an app, splits its functionality, and sells both on the app store. They hope that someone buys the first app, which is missing basic functionality, not realizing they have to buy a second app to get the additional expected features. Like if you buy a video converter app that doesn't let you convert to an MP4 unless you buy a second "MP4 version" video converter app. Scummy behavior, glad Apple blocked it.

There is a surge of vibe coded apps in the iOS community.

Some of them are good - generally by musicians or sound designers who couldn't code.

Many are utter trash, designed by developers who have barely any musical taste and simply told Claude to make some glitchy reverb pedal or groovebox. They use AI to write the copy for the app store and leave the UI as default (navy with fixed width headers, often looking like more like a spreadsheet than a synth). Sometimes trying to charge as much as $30 for it. It's a scourge but on the upside, most of them have now got their dopamine fix and moved onto something else.

Apple and Google are a mobile cartel, they need to be broken up.

This is absurd.

If people want the editorialized 'safety' of an App Store, they can use it, that's fine, but there's no reason to stop people from buying apps for their phone from wherever they want.

I m waiting for weeks to just enroll in their developer program, that i have paid for. Are they deliberately stalling everything to stop people from putting more stuff in the app store? I m going to go ahead and release the android version and make sure to badmouth apple to their users. life is short

Similar issue with shopify apps

The title is too friendly to Apple. Sure the flood of apps is making their lives harder, but also remember that they choose to force everyone through this and you have to PAY them to do their job this badly.

In a land of commodified apps, the platform has all the power and the dev has none. Like at this point, they could up their cut to 90% of revenue. There would be an outcry and many devs would leave. But in the end getting even 10% of the revenue of an app you whipped together by telling claude to "make an app, no mistakes" is too good to refuse.

I love how poor the writing in this article is. It gives me hope that not everyone has switched to AI.

> Developing and releasing a VST plugin is simple. You set up a website, upload your installers, set a price, and you’re good to go.

I don't disagree with the critique of Apple's policies, but boy this made me roll my eyes.

A company I'm familiar with had their app rejected for "App does not contain means to delete accounts"

Then all subsequent ones were rejected "Developer provided test account stopped working"

Logs show that the tester used the "delete my account" function..

As the only customer service available is an uncaring LLM, the only solution that worked was to keep the "Delete my account" button in the app, and make it a NOP on the server side.

https://phillipshoemaker.substack.com/p/who-is-actually-revi...

"About 80% of the reviewers on my team were former Apple retail employees. Many were Geniuses, the people who fixed your phone at the store. The other 20% came from elsewhere. They came from bartending, tree trimming, and tech."

"When I was there, a new app got about 13 minutes. An update got about 6. Those 13 minutes cover every localization, every screen, and every purchase described above."

This is why app review is a joke, and why the App Store is full of crap and scams.

According to Shoemaker, Steve Jobs demanded that Apple review every app, but Jobs resigned from Apple only 2.5 years after the App Store opened. More than 15 years later, it's clear that the App Store has outgrown the expectations of the dying Jobs.

I suspect that Jobs would have changed and adapted if he had lived, but Tim Cook seemed content to cash in on the easy App Store revenue.

Apple's app review process has always been a silly game. I have a music playing app, and every actual screenshot gets rejected in review for "displaying copyrighted content" (album art). And the terms of review say the screenshots must come from the app, not be mockups. So dumb. I have a fake music collection of fake artists and albums that I load to generate screenshots ... colossal waste of time.

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