> But that’s not what happened at all. Godier proceeded through a series of escalations up to the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.”

> It has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.

I have dealt with the Byzantine App Store bureaucracy before. What you do here, is you submit a new version, pretty much identical to the previous one, with the comment “tarot function removed”.

In my last SRE role I was the unfortunate victim of having to maintain a mobile app submitted to both the Android and iOS app stores. I would never wish it on my worst enemy. It was the one thing that I could absolutely _not_ guarantee any sort of reliability with. It was all up to the random person who happened to review the current release and the release process could be as quick as a day in the best circumstances or up to two weeks if we got a particularly difficult reviewer. They seem to have absolutely no context sharing between reviews.

What an insane ruling considering Co-Star is entirely an astrology app and was picked as an app store "Editor's Choice" at some point.

This is funny because they aren't approving anything right now

Developers are wondering if they are the only ones on their forums: https://developer.apple.com/forums/topics/app-store-distribu...

It's a massive problem that mobile apps are most users favorite way to consume programs yet are one of the few forms of distribution being gatekept by two massive and opinionated companies. It feels like the slow creeping rot at the foundation of the premise (and promise) of technology and the internet.

Which makes this a good time to remind everyone about the Keep Android Open movement:

https://keepandroidopen.org/

> "Starting in 2027*, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID."

as much as i loathe astrology, im not sure why astrology would be blanket banned in the first place.

and i am surprised that apps like "Night Sky" (great app, no affiliation) made it past review if the app store reviewers are incapable of telling the difference.

https://darkhours.io/ does look really cool, i hope they get this sorted out.

I've published both iOS and visionOS apps, and my favorite rejection came from visionOS. When you click a link to open it in Safari, the system uses an existing Safari window if available. The app was rejected because the link didn’t work... the reviewer had Safari open somewhere outside their field of view. Approved on appeal :)

This kind of thing reminds me of why I've always felt there shouldn't be a gatekeeper. Add your repos, install your apps. Folks should be allowed to have more than one repo to install apps from.

The arbitrariness of app store review hasn't been the greatest on the Google side, for me lately anyway. I got dinged for having an E-rating for my TV show info app that displays an official promo image for an episode of Landman, where a character has a wound with some blood on his face.

I pointed out that there were a couple other E-rated apps that show the exact same image, and many more T-rated ones that only warn of "In-App Purchases" — no "Violence" label. One of the latter is the official Google TV app [0], so I sent some screenshots of that, and asked if maybe they were "crushing the competition" by avoiding their own review process, to see if that would escalate my case (no such luck).

[0] The image is still the same in the Google TV app, and Google Search surfaces the image in question S1 E10: https://www.google.com/search?q=landman+season+1

The concept of computers that for programs to run on them need to be submitted to a committee who decides if the users computer can run it or not felt like where the tides were going for a long time.

Post AI this starts to feel absurd and look if OpenAI release a hardware device with an App Store will the process be days to weeks of review or will it be vibe code it in 40 minutes hit publish and it’s available to every device in 2 minutes?

Yeah think software is thankfully going towards a world where bureaucracy isn’t respected.

The apple decides what the box or square in your hand can do era is over.

It's why I love React Native and over the air updates. So I don't have to deal with this roulette.

Building web apps is far more enjoyable if only because you don't have to deal with the capricious nature of Apple's App Store review. It's non-deterministic CI at best.

Is astrology not allowed in app store? That's kind of a weird thing to ban.

I've been waiting for several days on my MacOS app review. After many successful releases, somebody has decided to nitpick the App description. Fixed and resubmitted. Then, another rejection for some other related aspect of the description. Fixed and resubmitted, now waiting on next review.

I'm good to make the description complaint, of course, but it seems the reviewer immediately halts as soon as they encounter any issue. Would have been nice to get both feedback points on the first response, especially given how long it can take to get back to the top of the queue.

At the end of the day, I regret my choice to use the App Store at all.

I am quite an Apple fan, but this dampens my enthusiasm considerably.

How many great apps are rejected, but build by people without reach?

I wonder how many people are turned off by iOS and have never bothered to learn to write an app for it in the first place?

I wonder what the internals of the App Store process are. For most app approval processes you can tell because you'll get connections from the Philippines etc. so I assume what's going on here is that these reviewers have a range of English proficiency with a median below what an American developer is used to. Then the rest is just hallucination from the human, guessing at what they're looking at.

Many years ago, like in 2017, my wife and I designed a dating app that was based on astrological matching. We knew it was tongue in cheek and advertised at as such. At that time we got a clear rejection from the App Store that they were no longer going to allow astrology apps. Fair enough, we pivoted the dating app to something else and it has been in the store doing fine for years now. But what we noticed was sometime around 2020, all of a sudden apple allowed a huge influx of new astrology apps into the store. It made no sense to us and seemed like bullshit, but what can you do?

Honestly, reading this, I kinda feel they have an AI integration in the review tool, which hallucinate and tell them it’s Astrology and employees at that level don’t want to go against that judgement

I look forward to this app now being approved because getting a viral post on reddit/HN/Twitter is what passes for customer service in 2026.

The most evil (yes) thing about the rejection is that the same stupid wrong misinformation about the app continued to be rubber-stamped as it propagated forward in what should be increasing levels of actual scrutiny and attention. They are lying to call it a review - it's mindless rubber-stamping either by design or because Apple employs people who just can't be bothered to do their jobs.

Damn. What a shocking level of incompetence.

Has Apple really sunk that low?

Reject this, but allow a billion spammy gambling scam apps pride of place in App Store searches. Gross.

From https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/apples-tigh...

> In a sworn deposition in the Epic lawsuit, Phillip Shoemaker, the former head of the App Review team, said employees in his department generally did not have a technical background in computer coding. They needed to know how to use a Mac and an iPhone, he said.

> “Qualifications were that they could breathe, they could think,” he said. And they typically worked at the Apple “Genius Bar” at the company’s retail stores. It typically took about 13 minutes to review a new app, Shoemaker said in the deposition.

Threadly reminder that we in the West, contrary to popular belief, are living through a profound institutional corruption crisis. The Cheeto-in-Chief is just the cherry.

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