What an AppExchange security review preflight actually checks
The email arrives looking innocent enough. "Congratulations on submitting to the AppExchange Security Review." Then you open the linked documentation and feel it, that specific flavor of dread reserved for large PDFs with multiple appendices.
Every Salesforce ISV has been here. You've built something real. Your customers are waiting. And between you and the listing sits a process that, from the outside, looks like a wall that randomly decides to open or stay shut.
Here's what nobody told me clearly, and what took embarrassingly long to figure out: the review isn't random. It has a structure. It organizes itself around a recognizable set of topic areas, and the day I actually mapped those areas out, labeled them, asked what each one was fundamentally protecting against, the whole thing shifted. It stopped being an intimidating monolith that happened to you and became something you could methodically work through before you ever paid for the real submission. That cognitive shift from "opaque bureaucratic wall" to "organized set of concerns I can address one at a time" is not a small thing. It probably saved me weeks of anxious, unfocused remediation work.
