App Store Review Playbook

Mobile App Shipping

**Everything we learned getting eight apps into the App Store and Google Play — including every rejection, with the root cause.**

Most mobile-shipping guides paraphrase Apple's and Google's documentation. This one doesn't. It's the accumulated scar tissue from shipping real apps in 2026: fifteen store rejections with what actually caused them, the build and upload failures that ate whole release cycles, and the setup decisions that would have prevented most of it.

Ships as a [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) skill — answer a few questions and it routes you to the right stage. It also reads fine as plain documentation.

🇹🇷 Türkçe: **[SKILL.tr.md](SKILL.tr.md)**

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The lesson that cost us the most

An app was rejected under **Guideline 4.2 (Minimum Functionality)** — "the usefulness of the app is limited because it seems to be intended for a small, or niche, set of users."

The root cause wasn't the app. Apple's rejection quoted, nearly word for word, a sentence we had written ourselves in the App Review Notes:

"We are targeting a deliberately **small**, curated early community — **a few dozen** invited members, **not a mass-market** social network."

We handed the reviewer the rejection. That's the shape of most entries here: the notice pointed one way, the cause was somewhere else.

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What's inside

SKILL.md                              the router - asks where you are, sends you to one file
references/
  01-prototype.md                     zero to an app on your phone, built to pass review
  02-testflight-ios.md                build, sign, upload, and the errors by code
  03-google-play.md                   keystore, SHA-1s, AAB, declarations that block releases
  04-app-store-submission.md          metadata, age rating, privacy, review notes, resubmission
  05-rejections.md                    the catalogue: 15 rejections with root causes
  06-stack.md                         the infrastructure underneath, an