Has anyone else had a build stay “In Review” for three weeks recently? I’m trying to figure out if this is just an unusually long review or if the submission might be stuck somewhere. It isn't an unusually long review in comparison with the other people who post reports about unusually long review times. People who aren't having long review times obviously aren't complaining about it. Apple is now using AI in some respect with the App Review process. Primarily this impacts new enrolments and people with new apps and multiple rejections. But lately, I've seen a few reports of people with established apps that are suddenly thrust onto the "slow queue". I don't have any other information.

Is anyone else seeing really long review times lately? Certainly all the people who complain about it on this forum. The people who aren't complaining may not be experiencing any problem. Also, is it worth contacting App Review at this point, or does that not really help? What you describe so far is well within the normal review times across the entire existence of the App Store. In today's world of AI-driven delays, it's very good.

Reports of delays are common. Some people complain as soon as they've waited 48 hours and 1 minute. Some people don't complain until after a few months. Generally speaking, it's very unlikely that you would ever get a specific response about your account here in the public forum. Use the official support methods instead. You may not get any response.

Do you known of any specific posts that have been removed? Try searching for them using Google. A while back, the back end for this forum was re-written based on the Apple Support Communities forum software after that had been re-written by Apple to replace a 3rd party product. This new software has an annoying behaviour where older posts will drop off certain activity lists. So they may still be there, but you'll have to use Google to find them. Generally speaking, this forum is very light on moderation.

Shows up fine in Canada.

Is there any supported path on iOS for an app to read, with the user's explicit and repeated consent, text the user is already looking at on their own screen, in order to give that same user an immediate assessment of their own work? Have you looked at Siri Onscreen Awareness? I don't know anything about it, or if it will do what you ask. Plus, I think each instance would have to be user-initiated. If there is no supported path, I would rather know now and design the iOS version around what is allowed, instead of shipping something that gets rejected or that quietly breaks the rules. Smart move. The official reply at this point is to recommend filing an enhancement request. Don't let that get your hopes up though. Check with your target ride share providers and see if they offer an API that your app could connect to on the back end. You could combine that with a little setup from the user, a little background GPS, and some AI, and make a pretty good guesstimate.

Has anyone else experienced such a lengthy delay when migrating from an individual membership to an organization membership? Obviously yes. I regularly see people with similar complaints. If so, how was it ultimately resolved? Nobody knows. The original posters (OPs) very rarely follow up. It's much more likely for someone else to ask for a status update 3 years later. As as you might expect, it rarer still for the OP to respond. But it's important to remember that it's only people who have problems that complain about it. There's no way to tell how many individual->organization migrations happen successfully. Another problematic aspect is that people never ask for advice until they start a process and it stalls. It most cases, it would have been better to create a new account for the organization and stay in a more automated flow. It's unlikely that apps from the individual account are generating enough money to make them worth keeping. And if they are, it's a big risk to put them on ice for an undetermined length of time until the migration completes. I realize you're asking Developer support and not me. But given your past experience, it's reasonable to assume they aren't going to respond. 😄 They definitely aren't going to respond in a public forum.

This reminds me of an important plot point that's easy to forget. Fraud on the internet is more than fraudulent developers trying to scam Apple or Apple's users. In many cases, it's small developers who are the victims of fraud. When confronted, actual fraudsters are more likely to laugh it off, because they know they're frauds, but it pays big money. Victims are more like to be offended when told that they've been defrauded. They'll often double-down in support of the people that scammed them and attack the people who told them about it - people like me or Apple.

I'm just a developer who followed a fairly common YouTube-tutorial playbook for setting up a US LLC to sell software globally Yeah. The internet's not true. It was much easier 30 years ago. But today, it's a real minefield. Selling from the US offers no benefits to an individual developer. Technically, you are correct about the ease of access to financial services from the US as compared to China. But that easy access was designed for people moving millions or billions. It's not meant for you. The biggest issue these days is tax and consumer law compliance. The EU started that. The US is slowly getting into the game. Sellers are now expected to comply with the laws at the consumer's point of purchase. So that means all laws in the world now apply to individual software developers sitting at home at their computers. There are a handful of companies that provide global pricing and tax compliance for developers. By "handful" I mean about 5. Apple is one of them, but operates much differently. Most of the hassles that Apple imposes on developers are part of an effort to prevent fraud. But aside from Apple, fraud is simply another internet business, and an extremely profitable one. Government regulators generally look the other way as long as taxes are paid. So Apple has to do most of the work on its own, with a lot of secrecy.

I don’t need another explanation telling me to be patient. I need someone with the appropriate access to investigate the actual technical/operational blockage and resolve it. This is the developer forum on the internet. You aren't asking "someone with the appropriate access", you're asking randos surfing the web while drinking their morning coffee. Such people can help with your technical questions, but since they aren't Apple employees, they can't look at your internal documents nor can they do anything to move the process forward. Asking said coffee-swilling randos a second time isn't going to be any more effective than the first time you asked them.

Many people's submissions are taking much longer, both in "waiting for review" and "in review" stages. Reports of multi-week waits are not uncommon. And those are for standard spam astrology dating apps. It seems logical that a "digital asset trading" with age verification concerns is going to take more time to review. And you've already had multiple rejections. I'm afraid it's not looking good.

While a public app can be converted to unlisted, you can't go the other direction. You'll have to create a new app record, as described in the documentation.

I've seen good advice and conversation on these forums, or at the very least developers getting confirmation of the situation where Apple are silent. The forums, for all reasonable purposes, are dead and have been for a couple of years. These forums were originally conceived of as a place to get help with technical problems. It's unique because there are actual Apple Developer support engineers who regularly participate and can provide very useful insight, both positive and negative, to real-world developer problems. At least, that was the idea. Then it pretty much died. These incessant App Review complaints have revived it, albeit as more of a zombie forum. Apple never replies to those App Review complaints. Very rarely, App Review itself will chime in and say the matter has been resolved and that's that. While I've also seen a couple of helpful answers from yourself, I've also seen you reply with seemingly deliberately unhelpful reflections usually on entirely unrelated points, or confusing off-topic rants. I've found it hard to tell whether you're being rude or purpose or have no idea that you're doing it. It's a forum, isn't it? You're always welcome to chime in if you think you can contribute. Your personal attacks are actually pretty amusing. I've been mostly silent here for a long time, especially once AI slop hit. But one weekend I decide to go in and answer some of these posts and all of the sudden I'm the problem. Fine. Use that little flag icon and report me. (But just so you know, this is an internet discussion forum after all. From Apple's perspective, all of this bickering is nothing more than "engagement". And there ain't so such thing as bad engagement in this context.) If they're posting on this forum they're usually hitting a roadblock right before the finish line and a successful launch. That's an inherent problem in any tech support forum. People invariably only ask for help when they've dug themselves very deep into some rabbit hole. They get very angry at any offers of ropes or ladders when what they clearly need is a bigger shovel. Can you see why at this point it's not helpful to suggest that they make a different app? Because what the App Store really needs is another astrology dating app. Or to criticise every aspect of their implementation? I would never criticize every aspect of an implementation, only the poor aspects. Or to quote statistics about how many apps have to be reviewed as some kind of excuse for it taking (in some cases) over a month to get a review? Yeah! It's only 15,000 apps a day! Come on! In my opinion what most developers are looking for currently is [coddling] I don't disagree. But I'm fascinated at how so many people (at least the ones on the internet) seem to feel that Apple is this Big Evil that is blocking all progress. These people have no idea how brutal the real world is. There is no other industry where businesses get this kind of kid glove treatment. We are a family of sorts and I wouldn't want anyone to feel like they reach out for help and get told it's all their fault, or be made to feel unwelcome. No, we are not family. This is a business. Most businesses are failures. Can't blame me for that. You needn't worry so much. This weekend was an anomaly due to personal reasons. I hope to be getting back to my real work very soon now. Then you can resume your previous posting activity too.

I'd guess every country has its own complications there. But no country is on the same scale as the US. IRS regulations are unimaginably complicated. Any kind of "foreign" involvement will easily run into thousands of dollars just for accountants and lawyers, assuming you can find any that will even talk to you for such trivially small fees. And then there's the regular threats of imprisonment if you fill out the forms incorrectly. A US entity was really the practical path to get access to that kind of payment infrastructure. That's the right way to look at it. It's an "entity", not a real company. using a registered agent to set up a bare-bones LLC doesn't automatically make someone a scammer. Not every founder has the capital to set up something more elaborate or hire a lawyer for every step. That's all true. But that's what I'm talking about with regard to an "entity" vs. a "company". Both are legal, fictional persons. But they're also not the same. Other companies have the right to choose who they do business with. Some companies are wholesale only and will not sell to individuals. Other companies go the other way and refuse to provide tax receipts, invoices, or other artifacts that businesses typically demand. While you may not be a scammer, you are benefiting from the scammers. So many of them setup these fake companies for tax evasion, money laundering, and so many other reasons. Because there's so much money there, these companies typically can enjoy easy access to financial services. But Apple is different. Someone who doesn't have the capital to setup a business can simply enrol as an individual. Most companies in most other industries don't allow that at all. And on the other side, just because you have a legal entity doesn't mean Apple is willing to do business with you. In truth, all companies, Stripe included, work this way. They have their own criteria for deciding who they do business with. It's just that Apple is the biggest so it gets the most complaints and the most press. I've had multiple other companies refuse my business or drop me, not because I did anything wrong, just because of who I was or what I was doing, which was never illegal, immoral, or unethical in any way. But not Apple. So if you're trying to setup an organization account with Apple, it probably not a good idea to use those well-known LLC entity sites. Apple knows what they are. Apple has over 60 million developers. It can afford to pick and choose.

Apple is very specific about those failures. They didn't say the login didn't work, they it was "unresponsive". The most likely explanation was that Apple was testing in an unusual network configuration to see how the app would respond. It didn't. To avoid this problem make sure you handle all edge cases and all kinds of failure. At a basic level with TCP networking, there is no guarantee of any response. So every TCP network operation should have some kind of timeout. And don't take your final approval as confirmation that you were doing it correctly all along. Maybe someone at Apple looked at your app and decided it wasn't too bad and to just forget it for now. That might not always be the case. It's very common for people to get rejections out of the blue for existing apps that have already been approved. It sounds like you've already given Apple a kill switch whenever they choose to push it at some point in the future. I recommend you take this opportunity to fix the problem rather than polling all the other people in this forum who are also struggling with rejections.