I was not able to find any terminology that Apple would accept, so I have removed all the annotations from the videos. They have accepted this, despite it clearly not complying with the requirement to indicate where IAP is required (guideline 2.3.2), and being less informative for customers. Interaction with App Review has been poor. My guess is that this has come up now because they have some new automatic analysis of preview videos that is able to read the text of captions. Based on keywords that it finds, it sends cut-and-paste rejections. Attempts to reply to the rejection messages just trigger further repetitions of the same generic messages, with absolutely no effort to address the core question, how can I comply with both 2.3.2 and 2.3.7 at the same time. I did speak to someone on the phone. He was an actual human, and his feedback did seem at the time to be useful; he said that the specific issue was that I was not allowed to refer to a price, and "free" is a price, and that it would be OK if I used some other expression; I suggested "no in-app purchase required", which he seemed to agree was "not a price" and so would be OK. This was all reasonably friendly and seemed useful - except that it was wrong. I regenerated all the videos with different annotations based on this conversation and they were rejected again. This is a long-established app that has made Apple hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission over the years; it annoys me that I get treated this way. I didn't generally support the idea of e.g. third-party app stores or side-loading since they could be used to distribute cracked versions of my apps, but having to wait three weeks to submit a bug fix (remember this was all caused by Xcode 15.0 creating apps that don't work on iOS 12 due to the borked linker) makes me more supportive of them.

s l a v e ??/?

Does the App Review team reply to the rejection without me having to re-submit? Yes. I get the same rejection parroted out with not much clue about which action I really need to take as it's quite vague. That’s normal.

you do need to resubmit for them to read your replies: Not true, in my recent experience. You can correspond with Apple, and include attachments, such as screenshots and supporting documents, until you resubmit to App Review. That doesn't say that they don't read your replies until you resubmit. It means, "when you resubmit, you are no longer able to reply further on that web page; the communication is closed". I've just been through a series of rejections and did get responses (albeit useless copy-and-paste repetitions) to my replies there, without resubmitting.

What is that called when a developer makes that request? It's called "not going to happen".

Are you using File -> New App Preview?

it no longer works with iOS 17. There has been at least one other thread about this, but they aren't easy to find because the forum search is so shite. IIRC, this is a deliberate change.

It’s always best to just do what they say: be patient is this "normal"? It’s not unusual.

No, it's not required. Here's what I see in App Store Connect: I haven't submitted any numbers; I don't know if my apps can currently be purchased in China. The last sales there were in March 2022.

Did you look at the U.S. screening list, as advised in the message?

If you publish an update that specifies a minimum required iOS version of 13, then users who have previously purchased your app with devices that cannot update beyond iOS 12 will be able to continue to download the last-compatible version.

from the fall of 2023. Is that correct? I believe that this has not happened yet.

We don't know what they are doing. I suspect it may be some sort of background check on you or your business, or maybe a more forensic analysis of the app to look for malware / backdoors - but that's just my speculation. The fact that it's your first submission may make a difference. It may be random, or it may be due to the particular nature of your app. I've been doing this for more than a decade, and review times have gone up and down. I did once get the "additional time needed" message, and I think it was resolved in a couple of weeks - with no clue what they had actually been doing for that time, except that my server logs indicated that they had not actually used the app in any significant way, IIRC. Others may have other experience / opinions. You could try searching the forum for "additional time" or some other phrase from the email - but the forum search is so crap you may not find anything.

Something to do with base64 encoding?

It doesn't matter what other apps do. You need to do what Apple tells YOU to do. Citing other apps will not help. how can I specify the price on in-app purchase if the price is not fixed Fix the price. You need to make your business model match what Apple supports. You cannot make Apple change to suit what you want to do!