Why your App Tracking Transparency prompt doesn't show up (and how it got my app rejected)

App Review rejected my iOS app under Guideline 2.1. The note said reviewers were unable to locate the App Tracking Transparency permission request when they tested the build. The prompt worked on my iPhone. Every single launch. It just didn't work on theirs. The cause turned out to be two properties of the ATT API that are easy to miss individually and genuinely nasty in combination: together they produce a bug that is invisible on a fast device and completely reproducible on a slow one. Your test device is fast. The reviewer's device is not necessarily. This post is the root cause, the fix I shipped, and the list of other things that silently suppress the prompt. The two facts that explain everything 1. iOS only presents the ATT prompt while your app is active Apple's documentation for requestTrackingAuthorization(completionHandler:) states, for iOS 15 and later: "Calls to the API only prompt when the application state is UIApplicationStateActive." That's UIApplication.State.active — not merely "in the foreground," and not "the code is running." During launch there is a window where your JS/UI is already executing but the app is still inactive : splash screen dismissal, the first render, a modal transition animating in or out. Call the API in that window and iOS declines to present. 2. When iOS declines to present, you don't get an error You get notDetermined back ( undetermined in expo-tracking-transparency ) — which is the exact same value you get when the user simply hasn't answered yet. There is no "I couldn't show it" signal. There is no thrown error. There is no presented: false flag. From the return value alone, "the user hasn't decided yet" and "iOS silently no-op'd your request" are indistinguishable. That's the trap. The API looks like it succeeded. The bug I shipped Reduced to its essentials: // Called during startup, while the splash screen was still going away. const { status } = await requestTrackingPermissionsAsync (); const granted = status === ' gr