The App Store rejected you — and that was the cheap outcome

App-store review is a production gate, not a formality — treat it like a security audit or you'll spend months resubmitting.

Apple's own review figures put rejections at roughly one in four submissions, out of the millions it processes a year — and analyses attribute a meaningful share of those, around 15%, to privacy violations alone. A vibe-coded app with no security review doesn't even get a graceful rejection; it gets stopped at the door. The gate keeps tightening: privacy manifests are now required, and recent rules mean an app using AI has to declare how it handles user data, or it gets bounced.

The other failure mode is simpler and dumber: crashes on edge cases nobody tested past the happy path on a laptop. Reports suggest a large share of iOS submissions face delays or rejections from exactly the preventable errors a basic security pass would catch. You have two options: invest in a pre-submission audit and pass the first time, or spend the next few months in rejection-resubmission purgatory, re-submitting, guessing, burning time and tokens you don't have. Apple doesn't care that AI built your app — it cares whether it's safe for its users.

Two checks from this doctrine

Real value, not a teaser — two of the 5 checks in full. The rest are in the one-pager.

Passing review on the first try is cheaper than every resubmission after it.