After all the hard work you have put into developing your application, it will be all-out if you can not get your application approved for the App Store. If Apple rejects your application, it’s usually not the end of the world. Most of the time, just make a small change and your application will happily be excepted.

In a small number of cases, if the basic functionality of your application falls into one of these categories for rejection, you will have to start all over again. So make sure you know what you can and can not do before you start.

Here are a list of reasons that could lead to App Store rejection.

This goes almost without saying, but do not abuse brands or logos. Apple is particularly strict about their products, so before deciding to reference Apple, be sure to read their Apple trademark and copyright guidelines.

Porn

Including porn in your application will get rejected immediately. This also applies to links to external Web content of this nature. Android allows this, if you use a third-party market for adults.

Trying to publish a beta or unfinished application

Having an unfinished application or beta in the App Store would make users unhappy, so make sure you have a fully functional app before submitting it for review. Fully functional means that all included features work well. There may be other functions that you might want to include later, for you to consider the complete application, but leave them out if they do not work yet.

Long loading time

Your application should generally be as fast as possible and having an application that takes forever to load does not reflect well on your or Apple, so iOS will kill your application if it does not load within 15 seconds. This is not unusual, because Android and Windows also have a maximum application startup time.
You should perform beta testing on other devices because load times may depend on different factors during the approval process. In particular, keep older phones in mind, as their processing power may not be enough to load your application on time.

Use of third-party payment systems

If you sell digital content, you must use the payment system built into iTunes. That’s why you can not buy Kindle books through the Amazon app.

It’s different if you rent a room or buy physical products. In this case, you can use a third-party payment system.

Gaming The Ratings System

It is your responsibility as a developer to ask your users to rate your app, but if you encourage your users to leave a 5-star rating, your app will be rejected.

An example would be to provide a notification screen that only provides options to leave a 5-star review or cancel the notification. What the user does when they access the App Store depends on them, but the screen that brought them there would be considered too coercive.

Using private APIs

Apple wants to make sure that you do not secretly access private information on a device (or that you do other unpleasant things). They do not allow you to call external frameworks / libraries or to authorize your external interpreted code download.

Using unlinked keyword terms

Even though you should include as many keyword terms as possible when submitting your application, you should also make sure that they are somehow related. Just because you think you can rank # 1 for the search term “blowfish”, this does not mean that you should use it for your word processing application.

Mention other application stores

Although your application is available in an Android and Windows version, you can not mention it in your application or on the iTunes website. To market your app to other app stores, make sure to set up a website.

Conclusion

If you keep these reasons for refusal in mind, you greatly increase your chances of accepting your app on the first try. Of course, there are other reasons why your application might be rejected and Apple’s rules change occasionally, but these are the most important ones.