Getting a rejection email from App Review feels personal. It usually isn't. Apple runs the same review process against every submission, and most rejections trace back to a small number of guidelines that come up again and again. Knowing which ones, and what they actually mean, turns a vague rejection into a fixable checklist.
How often this actually happens
Apple's own 2024 App Store Transparency Report puts real numbers on this. Out of 7.77 million app submissions reviewed that year, 1.93 million were rejected, roughly 25%. Of those, 295,109 were fixed and approved on resubmission. Separately, 82,509 already-live apps were removed after the fact, most commonly for guideline or design violations (42,252), followed by fraud (38,315).
Apple hasn't published a breakdown of rejections by specific guideline number, so treat any listicle claiming "62% of rejections are X" as unsourced. What Apple has said, in its own commentary alongside the report, is that the most common drivers, in order, are performance and bugs, legal issues, design problems, business-model (payment) violations, and safety risks. That ordering lines up with the specific guidelines below.
The guidelines that actually catch people
