PSA: Stricter Apple App Review Enforcement

I just wanted to give people a heads up to potentially save a few days in App Review.

Apple seems to have recently tightened their enforcement surrounding NS Descriptions for protected resources. I had a couple of descriptions that were, “This allows advertisers to serve more relevant ads.” that have sailed through app review 50+ times, and it was rejected this time around. Also, this was the result of an automated review, so it wasn’t that I just drew a reviewer with a particular axe to grind.

Anyway, since Apple does it’s automated review only after you get to the head of the queue (unlike Google which does it’s automated review the moment you click “Submit”), getting rejected and resubmitting will cost you a few days.

As always, your milage may vary, etc.

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Just got hit with the same thing, despite not changing my description over the course of countless updates.

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Mine was also rejected, and it doesn’t contain any NS strings added by me. So I checked the generated .ipa and I see that Solar2D puts in a bunch of NS strings by default:

NSAppleMusicUsageDescription
NSBluetoothPeripheralUsageDescription
NSCalendarsUsageDescription
NSCameraUsageDescription
NSContactsUsageDescription
NSHomeKitUsageDescription
NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription
NSLocationUsageDescription
NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription
NSMicrophoneUsageDescription
NSMotionUsageDescription
NSPhotoLibraryAddUsageDescription
NSPhotoLibraryUsageDescription
NSRemindersUsageDescription
NSSiriUsageDescription
NSSpeechRecognitionUsageDescription

I assumed that it would only add these if you were using this feature in your code, but it looks like that isn’t true. So, I added my own custom strings for ALL of these and resubmitted just now. I’ll update this thread after they review it again.

Ugh. I’m now very curious if my new build will go through.

Confirmed. I have a simple app that doesn’t use any features, and for many years didn’t have any NS strings in plist. Latest build would not pass their automated scan until I added these strings.

I put them into a gist so you can copy / paste into your build.settings file:

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Also, I have added these strings to ALL of my app updates. 17 updates in the last two days, and all of them have passed. Prior to doing this, they were getting rejected.

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Thank you for sharing that.

Same for me…