App Review Is Broken

This is not the article I wanted to write this morning, but here we are: forScore’s next major update is ready but we have no idea when it’ll be available. After months of planning and many hundreds of hours of work, Apple’s App Review is now the bureaucratic blockade that we cannot work around.

What’s the problem?

App Review has rejected forScore 14.3 three times in a row, providing the same copy-pasted response each time, ignoring our replies and questions entirely. They claim forScore uses the TrueDepth APIs (which it does, to provide the Face Gestures feature) but that its privacy policy is either unavailable or inadequate—they don’t specify.

forScore’s privacy policy has been available for years at forScore.co/privacy and has dealt with this specific topic. We don’t collect any data, from this API or others, and the information supplied about the position of your face is only used live to provide this feature when you specifically enable it. Moreover, App Review is not legal review and their opinions concerning our privacy policy should be limited to whether it exists (it does) and if it addresses certain sensitive APIs (again, it does).

What have we done?

We restated the facts, resubmitted our app, asked follow-up questions, and got the same inhuman response each time. We appealed the rejection, plead with our one contact in Apple’s Developer Relations team (not every developer is lucky enough to have one) to escalate our case, and then we sat for four days hearing nothing but silence.

forScore 14.3 was submitted within 20 minutes of it becoming technically possible to do so, about a week ago in preparation for this big day. We’ve been given no potential path to move forward despite the fact that this feature, and our privacy policy, have not changed in years and many updates have been approved under the same circumstances.

Where does this leave things?

forScore 14.2 is compatible with iOS 18, iPadOS 18, etc. so this isn’t an immediate issue for forScore users. This is a terrible situation for us, though, as it squanders all of the work we’ve done all summer long in good faith. Our best hope right now is that it’s temporary and that we never get this same app reviewer again. That’s not a good foundation upon which to run a business, and I know Apple can do better than this.

Hoping to return soon with better news,
Justin

Update Sept. 23rd 2024: This update has now been approved. Our privacy policy remains unchanged.