I’d also appreciate a response from Corona staff. I don’t have ads in my app, and the reports above are concerning.
This is the first we have heard of this and it’s been reported to engineering. Apple does change their processing from time to time and maybe they’ve decided to trigger on other things. Give us a little time to investigate this.
Rob
Have you questioned Apple on this? We’ve observed that Apple periodically breaks their filters, resulting in false positives being flagged.
In particular:
-
We do not reference advertisingIdentifier (not to be confused with iosAdvertisingIdentifier as explained below), nor call a selector by that name.
-
We do not link to AdSupport.framework
-
We do not use ASIdentifierManager
And just FYI, we took care of this exact issue over 1 year ago when Apple made clear they were going to enforce those rules.
Also, one clarification:
Apple is flagging “advertisingIdentifier”, and NOT “iosAdvertisingIdentifier”. The latter is a string in our code for a Lua API (system.getInfo), which is there for backward compat purposes. It’s currently a no-op.
Thanks Rob and Walter. My app is currently before their review board. If they reject it again I will resubmit with your comments and hope that helps. Ugh - hope I don’t have to do another 2 week wait.
When they reject you, you get a link to have a conversation with the folks who rejected it. I think after you resubmit, you loose that link. But as Walter said, this sounds like something they need to fix.
Rob
Thanks, Walter and Rob. I also found iosAdvertisingIdentifier referenced in the executable inside the .app directory of a Corona-built app and was wondering why it was there.
Hope that everyone finds out what’s happening!
Was this rejected right after you uploaded your App to iTunesConnect using the AppLoader or after you submitted it for review? What build were you using?
As a test, I just upload our DeviceInfo sample app built with our recent daily build (2575) and it uploaded without any warnings and I haven’t seen any automatic warning email from Apple after the upload.
It uploaded with the AppLoader fine. It was after the loooong wait time that it went from “Waiting for review” to “In review” - then rejected. This was not an automated rejection.
As mentioned above, I’ve tried build 2015.2571 and same binary rejection.
The only think I can think of is they scan for any ad-related identifiers and “AdvertisingIdentifier” comes up even though the name in my (and others) app is “iosAdvertisingIdentifier”.
Seems like it would be really safe if none of the ad-related names were used in whole or part in the final binary.
It could be that Apple have recently decided to turn off case-sensitivity and now get any results even with partial matches.
This is something that Apple would need to fix on their end. If you get rejected again, don’t delete the binary, or try to upload a new one. As Rob said above, you should be able to see a link in your iTunes Connect account on the rejected app’s page and have a conversation with the review team. If that fails you can also submit a more formal appeal to Apple.
UPDATE: I again sent a message via Apple’s review board with a copy/paste of Walter’s message. I got a reply (maybe from my first review submission?). There was no explanation but my app (Ukodus) is now available for sale.
I want to thank everyone that responded and the staff too. I hope this will not affect anyone in the future - maybe a simple refactoring of that name?
Thanks again!