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A simple tip to reduce App Store rejections

Using an oft-forgotten field in iTunes Connect

Over the past two years, our team has launched over 60 releases for 7 apps in the App Store. We’ve learned a ton about what users are looking for and how to position and market an app to give it its best chance of being installed. Going through this process so many times even inspired us to create LaunchKit, a whole toolkit for app developers and marketers to use when releasing apps.

We’ve also learned a lot about what Apple’s app review team looks for (or rather, what they look out for) when reviewing an app. We’ve learned this through rejection. Lots of it. 13 times over the past 18 months.

Our last rejection was almost an entire year ago.

Rejection hits the inbox in the form of “App Submission Feedback”, saying:

[Your App] has been reviewed, but we are unable to post this version. For details, or to directly contact the App Review team, visit the Resolution Center in iTunes Connect.

In the resolution center, Apple tells you the reasons your app was rejected, always citing a section of the App Store Review Guidelines. We found that many times, the same app would get rejected sometimes and approved other times. So much depended on the specific app reviewer. And this got very frustrating.

So, after constant rejection through 2014, we decided to start trying to do something to get all reviewers on the same page. In the beginning of 2015, we started using an often ignored field in iTunes Connect, which led to a much more successful app submission process.

App Review Information: Notes

At the bottom of the iTunes Connect page where you prepare your app submission, there is a section called App Review Information.

We’d always included login information for a demo account filled with gorgeous content. Pretty obvious, and you should definitely do this for your app.

But the big game changer for us was starting to use the “Notes” box. We began to list common confusing points we were constantly being rejected for in this box and adding proactive explanations for the review team.

One example was our content flagging process. We were rejected multiple times because it wasn’t clear how flagged content was handled, even though our answer was always the same. So we added this to the notes box:

Notes about content being Flagged for review:

We take inappropriate content very seriously. If there is a photo uploaded that someone thinks is inappropriate, they can tap the three dots under the photo on the bottom right in the timeline view, or the three dots in the bottom left of the single photo view.

If they uploaded the photo, there is an option to “Delete Photo”. If they didn’t upload the photo, they will see “Flag for Removal”. If they tap this, the photo is instantly invisible to everyone else. The only people who see it are the person who flagged it (who sees a message about the photo being invisible) and the person who uploaded it (who sees a message about their photo being flagged).

Our explanation might seem verbose, but we wanted to provide as much information as we could. And since we added this, we have never been rejected for this reason. We also added a few notes about how to move around the demo account, and other unique things about our app that we wanted to point out.

In conversations with some people at Apple, we’ve confirmed that app reviewers pay special attention to this box. It’s not there for fun, it’s there for you to communicate directly with the app reviewer and provide context for them to use in their review.

If there’s anything about your app that you think might be confusing to an app reviewer, put something in Notes. Don’t leave this box blank. It can save you from the painful sting of rejection and accelerate the sweet celebratory joy of acceptance.