The most common reasons Apple rejects your app

Getting a rejection email from App Review feels personal. It usually isn't. Apple runs the same review process against every submission, and most rejections trace back to a small number of guidelines that come up again and again. Knowing which ones, and what they actually mean, turns a vague rejection into a fixable checklist. How often this actually happens Apple's own 2024 App Store Transparency Report puts real numbers on this. Out of 7.77 million app submissions reviewed that year, 1.93 million were rejected, roughly 25%. Of those, 295,109 were fixed and approved on resubmission. Separately, 82,509 already-live apps were removed after the fact, most commonly for guideline or design violations (42,252), followed by fraud (38,315). Apple hasn't published a breakdown of rejections by specific guideline number, so treat any listicle claiming "62% of rejections are X" as unsourced. What Apple has said, in its own commentary alongside the report, is that the most common drivers, in order, are performance and bugs, legal issues, design problems, business-model (payment) violations, and safety risks. That ordering lines up with the specific guidelines below. The guidelines that actually catch people These are pulled directly from Apple's current App Store Review Guidelines, not paraphrased from a third party. Guideline 2.1, App Completeness. Covers crashes, obvious bugs, placeholder content, broken demo accounts, and non-functional in-app purchases. If a reviewer can't get past your login screen or your app crashes on launch, this is the line it gets cited under. It's the single most avoidable category, because it's the one you can actually test yourself before submitting. Guideline 4.2, Minimum Functionality. Your app has to be more than "a repackaged website." Apple wants "lasting entertainment value or adequate utility." A thin wrapper around a web view, with no native functionality added, gets flagged here. A sub-clause, 4.2.6, specifically targets apps built from c