Urgent App Review Escalation: Time-Critical Government-Funded Public Event, 7 November

Hello Apple App Review Team,

I'm following up as this submission has now remained in "Waiting for Review" for 11 days.

Despite an expedited-review request and three separate Developer Support enquiries, we have received no response.

With just 18 days remaining until the 7 November performance, the delay is becoming increasingly critical to the preparation of approximately 2,000 participants.

Could someone from the App Review team please investigate whether our submission is progressing normally and assist with an urgent escalation?

Any assistance or acknowledgement would be greatly appreciated.

An expedited app review request was also submitted.

Your post is one of the few legitimate expedited review requests that I've seen here in the forums.

Unfortunately, AI slop has hit the App Store very hard. Every post I've seen here in the forums complaining about delays and rejections also indicates they've submitted an expedited review request. The few posts that actually have a deadline tend to submit their apps only a few days before said deadline.

Hopefully you'll get approved in time. But if anyone is reading this in the future and has a legitimate deadline, perhaps it would be better to submit two months in advance.

@andyoneil, Don't use the comments. They hide your replies.

Beyond frustrating that apple has had zero communication, and there appears to be no other way to escalate this or discuss with a human to review the situation.

Apple has multiple methods of escalation. For a rejection, you can reply to comments. You can appeal a rejection. You can request an expedited review. You can contact developer support. You can sign up for a "Meet with Apple" session and discuss unique issues directly with the App Review team.

We were not aware of the time delays/backlog - so its very much unexpected stress.

You might want to review the 2025 App Store Transparency report. In 2025, Apple rejected over 2 million submissions. That's over 5000 rejections a day. Apple approved 20,0000 a day.

But even that relatively small number of rejections is sufficient to completely swamp all of those escalation methods that I mentioned above. And that 2025 report was from before the deluge of AI.

Not sure if Apple saw this thread or my support requests, or if we just finally got through the queue - but the app was just approved.

Just FYI (if it helps anyone else going through a similar situation), we didnt received any responses to the support request emails over the last 12 days. Also, I have been keeping an eye on the dashboard - it went straight from "waiting for review" to approved, no "in review" status (that I was aware of at least, I checked it probably 1hr prior to receiving the approval email).

Anyway, glad it's finally sorted, a lot of stress alleviated.

Good luck to the others in the forum, I hope they clear for you soon too.

@andyoneil I was in exactly the same situation, but yesterday I received approval for the second revision of my rejected app. After opening a case, waiting 30 minutes on the phone for someone at Apple to pick up, and posting in this forum, I finally got it approved.

I had another app that passed review very quickly, so I was surprised that my rejected app was taking so long. This may be a dumb question, but did you happen to edit your app profile while you were waiting for review?

I edited every field in my app profile, hoping that doing so might reset any internal bad state caused by the automated review. Few hours later, the review started. Sorry if this is sounds paranoid, but I have another app update scheduled in the next few days, and I don’t want to spend 20 days waiting for review if I receive another rejection.

@robertomuj - no, I didnt edit app profile.

Probably a coincidence, but I did do a test flight version update (in my other developer account, however). This was maybe an hour prior - and that test flight app update was immediately approved. Then the other app that was stuck on "waiting for review" also suddenly got approved.

That seemed odd, but probably unrelated, I guess.

Good luck.