Before you submit
Why app submissions get rejected, and the links to check first
About one submission in four is rejected, and the cheapest rejections to prevent are the ones about metadata and links a reviewer opened and could not use.
Nothing here is sent anywhere or saved. This runs in your browser and recognizes five common citations — not every one that exists.
Rejection is normal, not exceptional
Apple publishes the figures itself: of 7.77 million submissions reviewed in 2024, 1.93 million were rejected — about one in four. Planning for one round of corrections is realistic; being surprised by it is what costs a launch window.
The largest category is performance, and the cheapest is metadata
Performance is the biggest bucket by a wide margin — crashes, dead ends and incomplete builds, guideline 2.1, App Completeness — with more than 1.2 million rejections in 2024 on its own. That one costs engineering. The next ones do not: accurate metadata is 2.3 and the privacy policy link is 5.1.1, and they cover a support URL that does not work, a policy link that 404s, screenshots that do not match the app, and a demo account that does not log in. None of that requires changing a line of code to fix.
Privacy and data are the next largest
Guideline 5.1.1 and its equivalents on Play account for roughly a fifth. The common shapes are a privacy policy that does not describe what the app actually collects, a data safety form that disagrees with the policy, and asking for a permission the app does not visibly need.
The links are the cheapest thing to get right
Wording takes judgement. A URL that opens does not. Before you submit, open every link in your listing in a private window, on a device with the app uninstalled, and confirm each one shows what you said it would. It is fifteen minutes against a review round of several days.
Open every one of these in a private window
- Privacy policy URL — loads, no login, describes what the app collects.
- Support URL — loads, reaches a person, is not your store listing.
- Account deletion URL — loads without the app installed, if you have accounts.
- Marketing URL, if you provided one.
- Your Data Safety and App Privacy answers match your privacy policy — Lanpage derives both from the same wizard answers, so there is one place to fix, not two.
- The demo account, actually logged into.
Questions
- How long does a rejection cost me?
- A review round, typically a day or two per attempt, plus the time to fix and resubmit. The links are worth checking precisely because they are the failures with the worst ratio of prevention cost to delay.
- Can any tool guarantee approval?
- No, and be careful with anything that says otherwise. Approval is the store decision about your app. What a tool can do is make sure the addresses you submitted work and keep working.
- The rules changed after I shipped. Now what?
- That is the normal case — store requirements moved several times between 2024 and 2026. The point of keeping your documents in one editable place is that responding is an edit, not a release.
Get the links right before you submit
Publish your privacy, terms, support and deletion pages at addresses that keep working, and see what is still missing.
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