App Rejected (4.3.0 Design Spam) (I'm a iOs developer since 2009 and this is the first time)

Question

Dracoders OP

Created 1w

Replies 3

Boosts 0

Participants 3

Title: App Rejected (4.3.0 Design Spam)

Hi everyone,

I need help understanding why my app was rejected with the reason 4.3.0 Design Spam. The explanation from Apple was very generic, and it doesn't really help me figure out how to resolve the issue.

It’s a puzzle game we’ve been working on for about 3 years, with completely hand-drawn graphics and 250 manually designed levels created using a custom editor built specifically for Mac. We haven’t used any automatically generated assets or recycled content from other apps. This is an Alpha version but fully playable—we’re using it to test retention and gameplay, not monetization.

We’ve already tried contacting Apple’s support team, but we haven’t received any response so far.

The same thing happened about a month ago with a penalty kick game we developed using SpriteKit specifically for Apple Watch. That game was also rejected with the same reason, and again, we weren’t able to understand why or get in touch with support for clarification. In that case, I wondered if the problem was either the simplicity of the game (even though it was fully coded from scratch and had hand-drawn graphics by our designer), or because that game was initially uploaded by an external freelancer to his account for testing purposes on TestFlight (but he never actually published the app).

Has anyone experienced something similar or has any advice on how to clarify this situation with Apple? Is it possible to request a more detailed review or get in touch with someone at Apple to understand where the real issue might be?

Thanks so much to anyone who can help me out!

Answered by App Review in 842289022

Thank you for your post and appeal. We're investigating and will contact you in App Store Connect to provide further assistance. If you continue to experience issues during review, please contact us.

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Answer 1

Claude31 OP

1w

There are several reasons for 4.3 rejection, some are not spam by itself but overcrowded category.

b) Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated;… We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience.

Searching on the AppStore, one can see there are a lot of puzzle games.

So may be that's just the reason.

If so, have you arguments to convince reviewer that your app creates a unique, high-quality experience ?

0

Answer 2

App Review OP

Apple

1w

Accepted Answer

Thank you for your post and appeal. We're investigating and will contact you in App Store Connect to provide further assistance. If you continue to experience issues during review, please contact us.

0

Answer 3

Dracoders OP

1w

@Claude31 (sorry the reply button doesn't work on my browser) In the past, we often produced games in just a few months, but this time we invested a lot of money to create and test a puzzle game with different dynamics from existing ones. The game is clearly of higher quality than the older ones I had published, so we were quite surprised. We also check the App Store and Google Play daily to ensure this gameplay doesn’t already exist. However, one of the developers often uploaded the build to their own account for TestFlight, so we thought that might be the issue, but it's just our guess.

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