Why website apps get rejected

App review

These are the rules that catch website-to-app products. They are worth understanding whether or not you use Apps Made With AI — and if you do use us, this is what the product is designed around.

Guideline 4.2

Minimum functionality

“Your app should include features, content, and UI that elevate it beyond a repackaged website.”

What goes wrong

This is the one that catches almost every website-to-app tool. If the app opens a web view and does nothing a browser cannot, it gets rejected — and a second submission with the same build gets rejected again.

How Apps Made With AI handles it

Apps Made With AI builds a real native project. Push notifications, offline caching, native navigation and device access are on by default, and the wizard warns you before you turn off the ones that carry the argument.

Guideline 4.2.6

Apps created from a commercialised template

“Apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service will be rejected unless they are submitted directly by the provider of the app’s content.”

What goes wrong

Services that publish every customer app from one shared developer account are in direct violation. When Apple acts on it, every app under that account is at risk at once — not just the one that was reported.

How Apps Made With AI handles it

Your apps are always submitted from your own Apple and Google accounts. You connect them with API keys you can revoke, you own every listing, and nothing you ship depends on our account staying in good standing.

Guideline 2.1

App completeness

What goes wrong

Reviewers reject apps they cannot get into. A login wall with no demo credentials, a paywall on the first screen, or a page that fails to load in the review environment all come back as 2.1.

How Apps Made With AI handles it

Detection flags a login wall or hard paywall on your landing page before you build, and the submission checklist prompts you for the demo account Apple needs.

Guideline 5.1.1

Data collection and storage

What goes wrong

Requesting a permission without explaining it is both a rejection and a crash: iOS terminates an app that touches the camera with no usage description in its Info.plist.

How Apps Made With AI handles it

Enabling a capability makes its usage sentence a required field, and a build cannot start while one is missing. Permissions for features you turned off are stripped, because an unused request is its own rejection risk.

Common

A site that is not ready for a phone

What goes wrong

A missing viewport tag or a fixed-width desktop layout produces an app that opens zoomed out and unusable. Reviewers read that as broken, and so do your users.

How Apps Made With AI handles it

Apps Made With AI renders your site at phone width and measures it. If the layout overflows or the viewport tag is missing, you are told before you pay for a build, not after Apple tells you.

What we will not claim

No one can guarantee an App Store approval. Review is carried out by people, guidelines are revised, and two reviewers can read the same app differently. Any service promising guaranteed approval is either misunderstanding the process or misrepresenting it.

What can be done is to remove the known reasons for rejection — and there are fewer of them than people assume. The list above accounts for the overwhelming majority of failures we see for apps of this kind. Apps Made With AI builds every app so that none of them apply, blocks a build when something we know is a rejection is still unresolved, and versions every configuration so a rejected submission can be compared line by line with one that passed.

If your app is rejected for something we should have caught, tell us. We fix it in the platform, for everybody, not just in your build.

Find out where your site stands

The free analysis checks your site against the problems on this page and tells you which ones apply — before you build anything.