Update, August 28. First update after approval, and the review of it went differently than I expected, so here it is while it is fresh. Context: the app is a remote control for a streaming platform, so it needs that hardware on the same network before it shows anything useful. The first letter was 2.1(b): the reviewer could not locate the in app purchases. I replied with the exact path to the paywall, and I asked that if anything else was missing, they list it all at once rather than one item per cycle. I recommend asking for that. The next letter contained three guideline issues together instead of one, which is three cycles saved. 2.1(a) Information Needed. Without the hardware on the network, the reviewer never got past the device search screen, so nothing behind it was reachable, purchases included. Apple's wording is worth quoting: "providing a demo video showing the app in use is not sufficient". If your app depends on external hardware, a built in demo mode is not a nice to have, it is the answer. Mine now has one. A button on the search screen opens a synthetic device, a banner across every screen says it is a demonstration, and the purchase flow stays a real StoreKit flow rather than a mock, because the reviewer has to be able to actually test it. 5.2.1 Intellectual Property. The platform name in interface headlines and in store metadata. The letter offers two exits: documentary evidence from the trademark owner, or removal from the app and its metadata. For most of us the first does not exist, so it is removal, and doing it halfway costs another cycle. I took it out of interface strings, of the local network permission text, of the store listing and of the website the reviewer visits. One thing I had not thought about: service tiles that my app drew by itself. Names and icons that arrive from the user's own device are a different matter, so the tiles now show what the device sends. 2.5.4 Software Requirements. Background audio declared with, in their words, no feature that requires persistent audio. Two things to check before you write back. Does your app publish a Now Playing card and remote commands? Without it there is nothing for a reviewer to see even while audio plays. And check whether some other part of your app resets the audio session. In my case a small feature was setting the category to ambient every time a screen appeared, which quietly removed the right to play in the background. The complaint was likely accurate, and finding that was worth more than the review cycle it cost me. Now the part that is not a guideline number, because the numbers do not tell the whole story. It is exactly one month today. Somewhere in that month I stopped feeling like someone who builds apps and started feeling like someone whose full time job is applying for review. Open the mail, get a number, fix it, wait three days, get another number. The work itself I can do. That part is fine. What I find hard is this. All three of these issues were in the app on the day it was approved and went live. None of them was raised then. They are real, I am not arguing a single one of them, and the app is genuinely better tonight than it was on Monday. But they were just as real a month ago, and there are apps in the store today carrying in their titles the exact thing I was asked to remove from mine. I have no idea how to square those two facts, so I have stopped trying to. Maybe it is because the account is new. I do not know. And then the thing that keeps me sane and drives me up the wall at the same time: this is a remote control. It replaces a piece of plastic that fell behind the sofa. It is not a bank, it is not a social network, there is no pile of user data behind it. I have put more thought into it than the category deserves, and I use it every evening myself, which is the only reason I am still here. If everything in the store were examined with the care my remote is getting, ten lifetimes would not be enough to get through the catalogue. One honest thank you, and I mean it. I asked for every remaining issue to be listed at once, and someone did exactly that. That single letter saved me three cycles and three more weeks, and it was the first moment in a month when it felt like there was a person on the other end rather than a queue. If anyone from App Review reads these threads: that is the whole difference. One letter with everything in it, instead of one item per cycle. Resubmitted today with the demo mode, the cleanup and a screen recording from a physical device. Will report how it goes, either way.

Update, August 27. As promised, here is how the review of the first update (v1.1) is going. It illustrates something structural that I think anyone planning a release should price in. v1.1 is a small update: minor fixes plus the app's first in-app purchases — two auto-renewable subscriptions. The timeline so far: August 24, three days after submission — an automated rejection under 3.1.2: the app description was missing a link to the Terms of Use (EULA), which is required once you offer subscriptions. The message itself stated it was automated. Fair enough — the link was genuinely missing, and the fix took two minutes. But note what happened: a check performed by a script, which could run at the moment of submission, instead cost a three-day round trip. August 25 — resubmitted with the link added. August 26 — the app entered review and I received a 2.1(b) "Information Needed": the reviewer could not locate the in-app purchases within the app. I replied the same day with exact step-by-step instructions to the paywall screen. Now waiting again. Both issues — the missing metadata link and the question about locating the purchases — existed in the same submission from day one. They were raised one at a time, each costing a full round trip. That is the structural point I want to put on the record: App Review reports one issue per cycle. Nobody sits down with your submission and hands you the complete list. So if your submission has N problems, expect N cycles, at roughly three days to a week per cycle. The total is easily a month or more — my v1.0 took 23 days and five rejections under five different guidelines, none of which had been mentioned in the round before (full history earlier in this thread). Practical conclusions for anyone who is where I was in July: Treat every issue as if it costs a week, because it does. Check your metadata against the guidelines with the same rigor as your binary — a missing link in a description costs the same round trip as a real bug. If you offer auto-renewable subscriptions, put the Terms of Use (EULA) link in the App Description and go through the 3.1.2 checklist before submitting. That one is fully preventable. Assume the reviewer does not have your hardware environment, and write your review notes for that case: exact steps, and a demo video ready. If you build apps for clients: do not promise App Store dates. Not "two weeks with margin" — no dates at all. The timeline is not under your control, and where a guideline is written ambiguously, the outcome depends on how a specific reviewer reads it that day. I don't claim to know the intent behind the process; I can only describe how it behaves from the developer's side: it is optimized for closing each ticket quickly, not for getting your app to a compliant state quickly. Once you accept that and plan around it, it is survivable. I'll keep posting as v1.1 progresses.

Fair point, so here is the full list of what I actually did, for whoever comes next. I cannot tell you which of these worked. I suspect that is by design: if one trick reliably worked, everyone would use it. Posted in this forum. I genuinely hope someone from App Review reads these threads, and I think someone did. On the 2.1 "Information Needed", I replied in Resolution Center and attached a demo video recorded on a real device. Fifteen minutes later I got 4.3 instead. On 4.3, I filed an appeal explaining why the app is original: a lot of research went into finding the real problems users have in this category, and the product was built around those. In parallel I changed everything I could suspect: new icon, new colour identity, new screenshots, revised keywords, and resubmitted. I also wrote to Apple through the official contact channels, twice. I doubt it helped, but I cannot rule it out. I requested a call with App Review. Never got a reply from that channel. Which does not mean it did nothing. That is the honest picture: many actions at once, one approval, no way to know which one mattered. It took a month. Today I am shipping the first update, with in-app purchase and the first fixes. I will post here how that review goes. Part of me expects another month. The other part stays hopeful.

Update, August 23. Approved. The app has been approved and is live on the App Store. I want to be specific with my thanks, because a general "thank you, Apple" would miss the point. What changed the outcome was that someone on App Review actually read what I had written, instead of returning another template. Whoever that was, thank you. You did not just close a ticket; you made it possible to reach a person at all, and that is the whole difference between a process that works and one that does not. I am glad that fairness turned out to exist here, even if it took the better part of a month to find it. I have been candid in this thread about how the process looked from my side, so let me be equally candid now. Over twenty-three days, a first submission and a brand new account, I am certain I made mistakes of my own along the way. All's well that ends well. For anyone who lands here searching for a 4.3 thread, the honest summary is this. The specific element was never named to me, in any channel. What I did was change everything I could reasonably suspect: a new app icon, a new colour identity across the whole interface, new screenshots, revised keywords. Then I resubmitted, and that submission was approved. I cannot tell you which of those changes mattered, and I would rather say so plainly than invent a lesson I do not have. Thank you to everyone who read this thread, boosted it, or replied. I'll keep posting updates here as the app develops and as it goes through future reviews. If these forums are where the next developer comes looking, this thread might as well be one that has an ending.

Update, August 21. Still "Waiting for Review." The submission from August 14 (20:01 UTC) has not moved to "In Review" in six business days. Since my last update: I replied to Developer Support case 20000128844197, open since August 5. I filed an appeal with the App Review Board on the August 14 rejection under guideline 4.3(a). I requested an App Review appointment. The next window opens on August 23. Everything else is unchanged. Twenty-one days since the first submission on July 31. Five rejections under five different guidelines. No reviewer has yet described a single thing about the app itself. The last rejection cited 4.3(a) - a rule about creating multiple Bundle IDs of the same app - against an app that has one app and one Bundle ID, and it named no element of the listing as the problem. I rebuilt the icon, the colour identity of the whole interface, the screenshots and the keywords anyway, because guessing is the only move available when the element is not named. Two questions still open to anyone who has been through 4.3: Did App Review ever name the specific element for you, in any channel - Resolution Center, an appeal, or an appointment? Did an appeal to the App Review Board produce a substantive answer, or a template? App ID 6795405234, Team AGKH5Z8JXY

Update, August 15. This has gone from a queue problem to something else, and I would like this on the record. THE RECORD July 31 - Version 1.0 submitted. August 4 - Expedited review requested. No response, then or since. August 5 - Developer Support case 20000128844197 opened. One status reply on August 12, twelve days later. August 5 - Rejection 1, guideline 2.3.7: a price appeared in a screenshot. Fixed the same day. submission reviewed on August 5. August 12 - Rejection 3, guideline 4.1(c) again, this time the name only. The brand was removed from the title entirely. August 14 - Rejection 4, guideline 2.1: a seven-point questionnaire about the app, with no issue identified in the app itself. Answered the same day, with a demo video recorded on a physical iPhone against real hardware. August 14 - Rejection 5, guideline 4.3(a), fifteen minutes after that reply. Sixteen days, five rejections, five different guidelines. Not one of them was raised in the round before it, although in every case the material being objected to was already in the build and metadata that had just been reviewed. THE PART I CANNOT RECONCILE The August 14 rejection cites guideline 4.3(a) and states that the app "shares a similar binary, metadata, and/or concept as apps submitted to the App Store by other developers, with only minor differences." Guideline 4.3(a), as published, reads: "Don't create multiple Bundle IDs of the same app (for example, submitting a separate map app for every city in the world instead of a single worldwide map that allows users to search any city)." That is a rule about one developer creating duplicates of their own app. It has nothing to do with other developers' apps. The text quoted in my rejection belongs to 4.3(b). I have one app and one Bundle ID. It also arrived fifteen minutes after my previous reply. A binary comparison was not performed in fifteen minutes. What was looked at was the store listing. I am not raising this to argue a technicality. I am raising it because I cannot fix a problem that is described by the wrong rule, and because I was not told which element of the listing was at fault. When I asked which part - icon, screenshots, keywords or functionality - the answer available to developers is that App Review does not provide that detail. I fixed it anyway, by guessing, and the guesses were substantial: a new app icon that no longer resembles physical hardware, a completely new colour identity across the entire interface, new screenshots, and revised keywords. That work is in the submission now under review. WHAT THIS APP ACTUALLY IS Before writing a line of it I went through around 62 apps in this category and roughly half a million publicly posted user reviews of them, and built the app around the complaints that repeat in those reviews and are answered by nobody: the app cannot find the device and there is no support to ask; volume does nothing on TVs that do not pass it through the player, and the advice given is to use the remote the user has already lost; typing is sent one character at a time and is unusable; headphone listening is advertised and does not work; the remote does not fit one hand. The app answers each of those. Support is built into the product, volume is negotiated directly with the television, text entry synchronises the whole field, private listening works, and there is a one-hand layout. It is not a template, not a purchased codebase, and it contains no third-party SDKs. It is free, with no advertising and no subscription. Whether that is enough to clear 4.3 is App Review's call to make. But it has never been made: no reviewer has yet described a single thing about the app itself. WHAT I AM ASKING FOR I am not asking to skip the queue and I am not asking for approval. Three things: That someone with authority read the full review history of App ID 6795405234 as a sequence, rather than as five unrelated tickets, and form a view on whether this app has actually been reviewed. 2. That if 4.3 is applied again, the rejection names the element - icon, screenshots, keywords, name, or functionality. One word would be enough. Without it I am changing things at random and calling it compliance. 3. That the citation error be corrected, so the next developer who receives this template is told which rule they broke. Expedited review, email to App Review, a Developer Support case, this thread, and replies in Resolution Center: four of those five produced no human response. And a question to anyone who has been through 4.3, genuinely asking: did a Resolution Center reply ever resolve it for you, or did it only ever clear after you changed something and resubmitted? Did App Review ever name the element? Searching these forums I find many 4.3 threads and not one where correspondence resolved it. If someone has the counter-example, I would like to read it. App ID 6795405234, Team AGKH5Z8JXY. Support case 20000128844197, open since August 5

Update, August 12. Still "Waiting for Review." The resubmission from August 7 (11:31 UTC) has not moved to "In Review" in five days. Where things stand: Both rejections have been fully addressed — the app was renamed to "Mote" and the pre-permission screen was revised so its call to action triggers the system prompt directly. Support case 20000128844197 is now seven days old with no reply. The expedited review request from August 4 was never answered. Twelve days total since the first submission on July 31, and the app has never once entered "In Review." Two questions I'd genuinely appreciate an answer to, from Apple or from anyone who has been through this: Is there currently an extended queue for first submissions from accounts created in the last month? If that is simply how it works right now, I will stop asking and wait. Is there any channel left that produces a human response? Expedited review, email to App Review, a Developer Support case and this thread have all gone unanswered. If there is something else I should be doing, I will do it. I'm not looking to jump the queue — I'd just like to know whether the submission is queued normally or stuck.

Update, August 10. The app was reviewed after this post and received two rejections — August 5 (2.3.7) and August 7 (4.1(c) and 5.1.1(iv)). Both were addressed: the app was renamed to "Mote" (full name "Remote for Roku TV: Mote") and the pre-permission screen was revised so its call to action directly triggers the system prompt. It was resubmitted on August 7 and has been in "Waiting for Review" since then. Support case 20000128844197 is still open with no reply. Is there a longer queue right now for first submissions from new accounts? Any guidance would be appreciated.