Apple rejected more than 2 million of the 9.1 million-plus App Store submissions it evaluated in 2025, a rejection rate of roughly 22%, according to Apple’s own May 2026 Newsroom update. That is down slightly from 24.8% in 2024 and 25.6% in 2023, even as the number of submissions keeps rising. Performance problems, not privacy or legal issues, remain the single biggest reason an app gets turned away, and the sections below rank every documented cause against Apple’s and Google’s own published numbers.
If you publish an app, this matters for one practical reason: most rejections are predictable and concentrated in a handful of categories. Knowing which category carries the most weight changes where you spend your pre-submission testing time.
What percentage of App Store submissions get rejected?
Apple evaluated 9.1 million-plus App Store submissions in 2025 and rejected more than 2 million of them, a rejection rate of roughly 22%, per Apple’s Newsroom fraud-prevention update published May 20, 2026. That total splits into over 1.2 million new-app rejections and roughly 800,000 rejected app updates. Apple published both submission and rejection counts as rounded floor figures (“over 2 million” of “9.1 million-plus”), so 22% is an approximation rather than an exact published rate.
Figure 1: Roughly one in five App Store submissions was rejected in 2025. Source: Apple Newsroom, May 2026 (approximate, based on Apple’s rounded figures).
The same 2025 update reports 193,000 developer accounts terminated for fraud and a further 138,000-plus developer enrollments rejected before those accounts could submit anything at all. Both figures point the same direction: Apple is filtering more at the account level, not only at the individual submission level.
| Year | Submissions evaluated | Submissions rejected | Rejection rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 6,892,500 | 1,763,812 | 25.6% |
| 2024 | 7,771,599 | 1,931,400 | 24.8% |
| 2025 | 9.1M-plus | 2M-plus | ~22% |
Source: Apple 2023 and 2024 App Store Transparency Reports; Apple Newsroom, May 2026.
A one-in-five to one-in-four rejection rate has held steady across three straight annual reports, which means rejection is a routine part of shipping on the App Store, not an edge case.
Which App Store rejection reasons rank highest?
Performance problems caused 64.0% of all 2024 rejections, more than Legal and Design combined, according to Apple’s 2024 App Store Transparency Report. Of the 1,931,400 total rejections that year, 1,235,471 were flagged for Performance (crashes, incomplete builds, broken core functionality), 445,696 for Legal issues (privacy disclosures, intellectual property, regulatory compliance), and 378,300 for Design (spam, copycat listings, minimum functionality). Because a single rejected submission can be flagged under more than one category, these three counts add up to more than the total number of rejections.
Figure 2: Ranked rejection reasons, 2024. Source: Apple 2024 App Store Transparency Report.
| Rejection reason | What it covers | Count (2024) | Share of rejections |
|---|---|---|---|
| Performance | Crashes, incomplete builds, broken functionality | 1,235,471 | 64.0% |
| Legal | Privacy disclosures, IP, compliance | 445,696 | 23.1% |
| Design | Spam, copycats, minimum functionality | 378,300 | 19.6% |
Source: Apple 2024 App Store Transparency Report.
The Legal category is where a missing or mismatched EULA does the most damage: an app whose in-app purchase terms, subscription rules, or third-party content licensing are not documented anywhere gets flagged here even when the app itself works fine. A EULA generator that names your actual in-app purchases, AI features, and licensing terms closes that specific gap before a reviewer ever opens your build. For the full picture on App Store size, downloads, and revenue this rejection data sits inside, see our App Store 2026 statistics roundup.
Performance is the reason to fix first: it alone caused nearly two-thirds of all 2024 rejections, more than every other documented category combined.
Is Apple’s App Store rejection rate rising or falling?
Apple’s published rejection rate has fallen three years running: 25.6% in 2023, 24.8% in 2024, and roughly 22% in 2025, even as the raw number of submissions grew from 6.89 million to over 9.1 million over the same period. Raw rejection counts still climbed year over year (1,763,812 to 1,931,400 to 2 million-plus) because volume outpaced the rate decline.
Figure 3: Three-year rejection rate trend. Source: Apple 2023 and 2024 App Store Transparency Reports; Apple Newsroom, May 2026.
A declining rate does not mean review is getting easier. Apple’s own 2024 report shows resubmission is a real path back in: 295,109 of the 1,931,400 rejected submissions that year, about 15.3%, were approved after developers fixed the flagged issue. The 2023 figure was similar at 15.8% (277,923 of 1,763,812).
The rate has moved down, but the volume of rejected apps has moved up every year on record, so fewer submissions are being turned away proportionally while more are being turned away in absolute terms.
What is changing in App Store review heading into 2026?
Two policy changes landed in the months before this rate started climbing back up, and both widen what a reviewer checks. Apple overhauled its age-rating system in July 2025, adding 13+, 16+, and 18+ tiers on top of the existing 4+ and 9+ ratings, with developers required to answer new age-rating questions for every app by January 31, 2026. Since April 28, 2026, every new App Store Connect submission must also be built with Xcode 26 or later, targeting an SDK for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, tvOS 26, visionOS 26, or watchOS 26.
Figure 4: Compliance deadlines added to App Store review since mid-2025. Source: Apple Developer News.
Neither change shows up in Apple’s 2024 rejection breakdown above because both took effect after that report was published. An app that cleared review cleanly in 2024 under the old age-rating and SDK rules is not guaranteed to clear it again in 2026 without a resubmission that accounts for both.
Why do apps get removed from the App Store after they are already published?
Removal is a different filter from rejection: it applies to apps that already passed review and later got pulled. Apple removed 82,509 apps in 2024, and just two reasons accounted for 97.6% of that total. Design violations under Guideline 4.0 caused 42,252 removals (51.2%), and fraud under Developer Program License Agreement section 3.2(f) caused a further 38,315 (46.4%), per Apple’s 2024 App Store Transparency Report.
| Removal reason | Guideline | Count (2024) | Share of removals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design violations | Guideline 4.0 | 42,252 | 51.2% |
| Fraud | DPLA 3.2(f) | 38,315 | 46.4% |
| All other guideline violations combined | IP infringement, spam, export control, copycats, and smaller categories | 1,942 | 2.4% |
Source: Apple 2024 App Store Transparency Report.
Appeals rarely reverse a removal: only 421 of 26,224 removal appeals succeeded in 2024, a 1.6% success rate, according to the same report. Utilities and Games were the two categories most affected by removal, consistent with both years Apple has published this breakdown.
Getting an app approved once is not the finish line. The same guideline categories that drive initial rejections, Design chief among them, are what pull an app back out of the store months or years later.
How does Google Play’s rejection process compare to Apple’s?
Google blocked more than 1.75 million policy-violating apps from publishing on Google Play in 2025 and banned over 80,000 developer accounts that tried to publish harmful apps, according to Google’s own security blog post from February 2026. Google also blocked over 255,000 apps from requesting excessive access to sensitive user data and its anti-spam systems blocked 160 million spam ratings and reviews.
Figure 5: The three-gate test an App Store submission has to clear, ranked by how often each gate fails. Source: synthesized from Apple’s 2024 rejection-reason data above.
| Metric (2025) | Apple App Store | Google Play |
|---|---|---|
| Submissions rejected before publish | 2M-plus | 1.75M-plus |
| Developer accounts banned | 193,000 | 80,000-plus |
| Fraudulent reviews/ratings blocked | 195M | 160M |
Sources: Apple Newsroom (May 2026); Google Security Blog (February 2026).
Both stores are filtering at similar scale in absolute terms, but neither publishes a directly comparable rejection rate: Apple discloses total submissions evaluated, letting you calculate a rate, while Google discloses only the count of apps blocked, with no published denominator for total submissions reviewed.
The Bottom Line
Performance is the reason to fix before you submit: it caused 64% of Apple’s 2024 rejections on its own, more than Legal and Design combined, and nothing in the 2025 or 2026 data suggests that ranking has changed. Legal issues are the second-biggest bucket, and a EULA that actually matches what your app does closes a meaningful share of that category before a reviewer ever flags it. The rejection rate has trended down for three straight years even as two new compliance requirements, age ratings and the Xcode 26 SDK mandate, landed in the months since Apple’s last full transparency report. Clearing review once is not permanent either: getting approved is a separate filter from staying published, and passing both is a separate question again from whether the app makes money once it is live, which is its own data story. Even apps that clear review face a second filter after launch: 95% of apps fail within 30 days of release, according to our separate analysis of post-launch app abandonment.
Frequently Asked Questions
What percentage of App Store submissions get rejected? Roughly 22% in 2025, or more than 2 million of the 9.1 million-plus submissions Apple evaluated, according to Apple’s May 2026 Newsroom update. That is down from 24.8% in 2024 and 25.6% in 2023.
What is the number one reason apps get rejected from the App Store? Performance problems, by a wide margin. Apple’s 2024 App Store Transparency Report shows Performance issues behind 1,235,471 of that year’s 1,931,400 rejections, a 64.0% share, more than Legal and Design combined.
How does Google Play’s rejection rate compare to Apple’s? Google blocked more than 1.75 million policy-violating apps from publishing on Google Play in 2025 and banned over 80,000 developer accounts, according to Google’s own security blog. Apple rejected roughly 2 million-plus submissions over the same year.
Why do apps get removed from the App Store after they are already published? Mostly two reasons. Design guideline violations and fraud together accounted for 97.6% of the 82,509 apps Apple removed in 2024, according to Apple’s transparency report, with everything else a distant third.
Sources and References
- Apple Newsroom. (2026). “The App Store Stopped Over $2.2 Billion in Fraudulent Transactions in 2025.” 9.1M-plus submissions evaluated, 2M-plus rejected.
- Apple. (2025). “2024 App Store Transparency Report.” Official PDF, 7,771,599 submissions, 1,931,400 rejections, 82,509 removals, full guideline-level breakdown.
- Apple. (2024). “2023 App Store Transparency Report.” Official PDF, 6,892,500 submissions, 1,763,812 rejections, 116,117 removals.
- Google. (2026). “Keeping Google Play & Android App Ecosystems Safe in 2025.” Official Google Security Blog post, 1.75M-plus apps blocked, 80,000-plus developer accounts banned.
- Apple Developer News. (2025). “Age Rating Updates: Upcoming Requirements.” Official Apple Developer documentation.
- Apple Developer News. (2026). “SDK Minimum Requirements: Upcoming Requirements.” Official Apple Developer documentation, Xcode 26 mandate effective April 28, 2026.
Note: All figures verified as of September 2026. Apple’s full 2025 App Store Transparency Report, with the guideline-level rejection breakdown matching the format used above for 2023 and 2024, had not yet been published as of this writing; this article will be updated with those exact category counts once Apple releases them. Enforcement figures change at least annually, so headline numbers here are refreshed on the same cadence.
