Updated on 29. October 2024 by Jan Bunk
No matter if you're publishing your iOS app in the Apple App Store or your Android app in the Google Play Store, your app will have to be reviewed by an app store employee before it becomes available for download. The app reviewer makes sure that your app complies with the respective app store's policies and guidelines, to ensure that the app store offers a safe and enjoyable experience for its users.
In this article, we'll take a look at the most common reasons apps get rejected. By avoiding these issues, you can ensure that your app gets published as quickly as possible.
Keep in mind that this article focuses on the review process for apps we created for our customers by turning their website into an app. We have a way to work around most of the common guideline violations mentioned below. So if you think your app might be affected by one of those issues, please contact us so we can work out a solution.
Unfortunately, Apple's review process for apps in the App Store is quite strict. If you're not familiar with their guidelines, you can easily make mistakes that lead to the initial rejection from the App Store. Let's see which sections of the app review guidelines cause the most app rejections (from our experience).
You might be required to process payments made on your website with In-App-Purchases (IAP) instead. As this section of the guidelines is quite detailed and provides lots of exceptions (section 3.1.3), we encourage you to read through it fully.
Examples of purchases that don't need to use IAPs:
If your website collects payments for any of the above exemptions, you can use our website to app converter without any problems.
But don't worry even if you need to use in app purchases, you can make some small changes to your website and then your app can use in app purchases. More information on how to integrate in app purchases on your website.
The downside of in app purchases are the fees you need to pay to Apple as well as the programming needed to integrate it. Due to that, typically we work with our customers to find a solution that gets accepted by Apple even without using in app purchases.
If your website offers a third-party login functionality (such as Facebook Login, Google Sign-In, Sign in with Twitter, Sign In with LinkedIn, Login with Amazon, or WeChat Login), you also need to offer a 'Log in with Apple' feature on your website. That way it will also appear in your app.
There's some exceptions to this rule though:
If you can't integrate Sign in with Apple, we can alternatively hide the other 3rd party login options inside the app, which also brings your app into compliance.
If your app is not intended for the general public (e.g. the app is only for your employees), Apple may not immediately allow you into the public app store, but instead recommend using Apple Business Manager.
Typically we can resolve that by also adding some app content that is publicly accessible for everyone.
Since early 2024, Google has become a lot more thorough in their app review process. Previously, they mostly conducted automatic tests, but now there are more human tests as well. In general, Google is still less strict than Apple when it comes to enforcing their guidelines, but if your app gets rejected, they unfortunately provide very little information about what part of a guideline you violated.
The most common issue that causes rejections by Google is that some part of the app store listing configured in the Google Play Console violates the metadata policy. This can have a variety of causes, but the most common ones are the following:
Typically these issues are easy for us to fix, because we have the necessary experience to understand what exactly Google dislikes about the app information.
This is a less common but more final type of app rejection. If your app falls under one of the following categories, it can't be published:
We hope this article helped you get a better understanding of common guideline violations to avoid in order to get your app published without any problems.
Of course we couldn't cover all possible problems, since that would make this guide way too long - and each app typically only encounters a small subset of the potential issues. That's why it's all the more important to have a competent app development partner that will also help you during the app publishing process. We of course offer this app publishing support for all apps created with our service. With our many years of experience gained from publishing hundreds of apps we have the necessary knowledge to get your app published no matter what issues come up.
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Hi, I'm Jan! I created webtoapp.design in 2019 while studying computer science in university. A lot has changed since then - not only have I graduated, but it's also no longer just me running webtoapp.design. We've grown to a global, fully remote team and have gathered lots of experience around app development and app publishing. We've created and published hundreds of apps in the app stores, where they've been downloaded millions of times.