Guideline 2.1(b): adding the subscription group is not enough

MySellingMate was rejected twice on Guideline 2.1(b) before I understood what App Review was asking for. If you have that rejection open in another tab, the answer is probably this: your subscription group is submitted and your individual subscriptions are not.

A group and its members hold separate states, and the group's state tells you nothing about theirs. Mine read "Ready for Review". Monthly Pro and Yearly Pro were both still sitting at "Prepare for Submission". On the surface everything looked finished.

What the first rejection said

On 20 August, build 4 came back on Guideline 2.1(b). The monthly and yearly In-App Purchase products had never been submitted for review at all. Nothing else was flagged: no metadata problem, no privacy issue, no content question. Apple asked for the IAPs to be submitted, and for a new binary.

That request has two items in it. I did one of them.

A new binary does not submit a subscription

On 25 August I uploaded build 5 and resubmitted. The rejection came back identical: same guideline, same submission, same explanation.

The new binary was necessary, because Apple had asked for one. It was never sufficient. Two conditions have to hold at the same time, and neither one implies the other:

• Each subscription has to reach "Ready to Submit", which it cannot do until an App Review screenshot is attached to it in App Store Connect.
• Each subscription has to be added explicitly as an item to the version's submission.

The first is about the product being complete. The second is about the product being included in the thing you are sending to Apple. I had been treating them as a single step, and a build upload satisfies neither.

Where the state actually diverged

The subscription group is where this goes wrong, and it goes wrong quietly.

In App Store Connect the group has a status, and every subscription inside it has its own. I opened the group, saw "Ready for Review", added it for review, and read that as the subscriptions being handled. The group is the thing you name and organise around, so it feels like the unit you submit.

It is not. Monthly Pro and Yearly Pro each had to be opened individually and added for review on their own. Until that happened they stayed at "Prepare for Submission", which is another way of saying they were not part of the submission at all.

Nothing in the group's status hints at the problem. A group reading "Ready for Review" whose members are all at "Prepare for Submission" is a perfectly valid state, and it is displayed without any warning. The parent looks finished. The children have not started. That mismatch survived two rejections because I kept checking the level that told me what I wanted to hear, and the level that would have corrected me was one click further in.

There is no partial credit here either. Two products were unsubmitted, and both had to be added. Getting one of them right would have produced the same rejection a third time.

The fourth requirement, which has nothing to do with status

The third rejection arrived on 25 August and into the 26th, and it was unrelated to any of the above. Auto-renewable subscriptions require a functional Terms of Use link, the EULA, in the App Description shown on the App Store product page. Not inside the binary, not on a settings screen behind a sign-in: in the description text a shopper reads before installing anything.

This one was metadata only. No new binary, no new build number, nothing to compile. I edited the description, added the link, and resubmitted the version.

It is worth filing separately in your head from the 2.1(b) problem. The first two rejections were about whether the products had been submitted. This one was about what the store page has to say the moment a subscription exists at all, and you can hit it even when every product is correctly submitted.

MySellingMate was approved and went live on 31 August.

What has to be true

Before an auto-renewable subscription clears review, all four of these need to hold at once:

• Every subscription has an App Review screenshot attached in App Store Connect. Without it the product cannot reach "Ready to Submit".
• Every subscription individually shows "Ready to Submit". Not the group: each product inside it.
• Every subscription is added as an item to the version's submission. Adding the group does not add its members.
• The App Description contains a working Terms of Use link, because auto-renewable subscriptions require one on the product page.

The first three are the same rejection wearing different clothes. The fourth is a separate rule that happens to apply to the same feature.

What I would want back

The five days between the first rejection and the diagnosis. I spent them improving the fix rather than questioning it: a cleaner build, a more careful resubmission, the same wrong model of what was being asked.

A second identical rejection is not a sign that you did the right thing incompletely. It is a sign that you did a different thing, and the review is telling you so in the same words it used the first time. When the reply does not change, the thing to revisit is the diagnosis, not the effort.

The status itself is the part worth carrying to other tools. Any interface that shows a parent's state without its children's will eventually let you ship a container with nothing in it. When something reads as done, it is worth asking what exactly it is reporting on, and whether anything underneath it is still waiting to start.