App Store Rejection Field Notes · Full Chapter

The Nine Questions: How to Survive Apple's 4.3(b) Survey

Chapter 3 of The 4.3 Survival Report · from a real account-level 4.3(b) batch strike — 27 apps flagged inside 14 days · November 2026

The 4.3(a) batch rejection sometimes attaches a survey. The questions ask about shared code, shared personnel, marketing relationships between apps, and why the apps exist. The temptation is to lawyer up and minimize everything. The failure mode is different: 21 near-identical replies landing in Resolution Center are themselves proof of a template operation — which is exactly what you're being accused of.

Question-by-question survival plays

Question clusterSurvival play
Q1–Q3 · What does the app do / who is it forConcrete mechanisms, not marketing. "User taps X, system does Y, stored in Z." One screenshot reference per claim.
Q4 · Did you develop it yourself?Never lie here. Approval decisions get revisited during account investigations; a discovered lie converts a recoverable 4.3 into a termination risk. Independent developer: say so plainly.
Q7 · Code shared across apps?State exactly what is shared (a 210-line localization helper, standard scaffolding) and what is not (core logic per app). Precision reads as honesty; minimization reads as evasion.
Q8 · Third parties involved?Same rule as Q4. "No agency. Built by one person."
Q9 · Cross-promotion between apps?Disclose what exists, even if it's unflattering. An undisclosed mechanism found later costs more than the disclosure.

The rhythm that worked

  1. One app per 48 hours. Not five in a day. Batch-sending identical replies at machine speed is machine-speed evidence against you.
  2. Best app goes first. A clean approval on your strongest app raises the odds for every thread behind it — and gives you a citable precedent: "{App} passed review on {date}; the shared components in question are identical."
  3. Draft, read end-to-end, then send. Never send a first draft. Once it's in the thread, it's evidence.
  4. End every reply with one sentence: "If anything still reads as spam, please identify the specific triggering element." It converts silence into actionable signal, and reviewers do answer it.
  5. Freeze all new submissions while any 4.3 is unresolved. Every new submission during a flag is another file in the case file.
Result: honest answers got the survey accepted faster than arguing. What followed is the honest part — 6 apps stayed frozen. The complete timeline is in the full report.

What the survey is actually testing

Apple isn't grading your answers. It's grading whether twenty-one answers look like one person or one template. Consistency of facts across replies, variance in phrasing, unprompted specifics (file counts, dates, API names) — these read as human. Identical paragraph structures, hedged passive voice, missing numbers — these read as mass production. Write each reply as if a different reviewer will cross-read it against the others, because they will.

This chapter is free. The complete 4.3 Survival Report — $19 covers both strike timelines, the full controlled experiment matrix (three queues, one variable), question-by-question answer drafts you can adapt, and the pacing budget that has kept the account clean since.
Get the complete playbook 📄 The 4.3 Survival Report — $19: both strike timelines, the full experiment matrix, survey answer drafts for every question cluster

✉️ 12 Rejection Reply Templates — $7: Resolution Center skeletons for 2.1, 4.2, 4.3, 3.1.1, 5.1.1 and more

🆓 Free 15-point pre-submission checklist — start here if you're not rejected yet and want to stay that way

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The full context — why batch 4.3 fires, the controlled experiment, the relapse post-mortem — is in the companion article. If you're currently in a batch-rejection hole: lead with your best app, one every 48 hours, and rewrite every answer per app.