So you already had Sign in with Apple implemented yet they told you to add it?
I had a similar experience for my Hacker News client. Apple rejected my app initially because they require developers to use SFSafariViewController instead of WKWebView when displaying third party websites from the app. I replied back to them that my app was already using SFSafariViewController and I didn't even have any WKWebView in the app so I wasn't sure what they were referring to.
Then it got rejected second time with: "- The layout does not take advantage of the full screen - When tapping on some of the content, the right part of the screen populates with a white page with no content."
To this I replied:
> My app did take advantage of the full screen iPad experience. In fact that was one of my selling points that my app supports the iOS UISplitViewController for iPads which lets you view 2 view controllers at the same Time size by side. From the screenshot the reviewer sent, it appears they clicked on "New" (I could tell because the number of points and comments in the screenshot are all zero). Now since they clicked on "New", obviously, it won't show any comments and is what the reviewer saw.
I had to ask the reviewer to try going to the main page and clicking on "Trending" or "Home" or "Best Stories" where they will see the full content? There is plenty of content and this takes advantage of the iOS native SDK for UISplitViewController. When you select a story on the left side, the detail story on the right shows the story discussion, threaded comments, ability to upvote/downvote, favoriting stories and comments (swipe left on a story or comment), view the full article by clicking on the link image on the right of a story, tap the reply button to reply to comments or stories, use the date picker to go to articles from a specific date, view leader boards of the top users, search for stories and comments etc. You can tap on comments to collapse the comment thread (not possible using a website). You can also swipe on a comment or post to upvote (left swipe), favorite (right swipe) which is also not possible using a website as these are only possible on touch screen devices. These are all implemented using native iOS SDK. UISplitViewController isn't even possible using a website.
It almost seems like the review team simply launches an app and rejects things without taking the purpose of the app in context.
Now to be fair to Apple, I develop for android too and good lord, they are even worse if your app happens to get caught by their "Artificial Unintelligence". You end up having to deal with a computer without any human on the other side unless you can make enough noise on social media and get some tech blogs to write about you as it happened recently with Droidscript:
I know someone who works on policy for a major App Store (not my employer, or I wouldn’t be blabbing).
They outsource content testing to an overseas operations team whose metrics are based on numbers of cases reviewed, with no review quality metric. Of course, they get what they incentivize.
Now to be fair to Apple, I develop for android too and good lord, they are even worse if your app happens to get caught by their "Artificial Unintelligence".
With Android, at least you can always just post the APK elsewhere and have your users get it from you directly; no such choice for Apple (unless you count the tiny number of jailbroken users.)
I had a similar experience for my Hacker News client. Apple rejected my app initially because they require developers to use SFSafariViewController instead of WKWebView when displaying third party websites from the app. I replied back to them that my app was already using SFSafariViewController and I didn't even have any WKWebView in the app so I wasn't sure what they were referring to.
Then it got rejected second time with: "- The layout does not take advantage of the full screen - When tapping on some of the content, the right part of the screen populates with a white page with no content."
To this I replied:
> My app did take advantage of the full screen iPad experience. In fact that was one of my selling points that my app supports the iOS UISplitViewController for iPads which lets you view 2 view controllers at the same Time size by side. From the screenshot the reviewer sent, it appears they clicked on "New" (I could tell because the number of points and comments in the screenshot are all zero). Now since they clicked on "New", obviously, it won't show any comments and is what the reviewer saw.
I had to ask the reviewer to try going to the main page and clicking on "Trending" or "Home" or "Best Stories" where they will see the full content? There is plenty of content and this takes advantage of the iOS native SDK for UISplitViewController. When you select a story on the left side, the detail story on the right shows the story discussion, threaded comments, ability to upvote/downvote, favoriting stories and comments (swipe left on a story or comment), view the full article by clicking on the link image on the right of a story, tap the reply button to reply to comments or stories, use the date picker to go to articles from a specific date, view leader boards of the top users, search for stories and comments etc. You can tap on comments to collapse the comment thread (not possible using a website). You can also swipe on a comment or post to upvote (left swipe), favorite (right swipe) which is also not possible using a website as these are only possible on touch screen devices. These are all implemented using native iOS SDK. UISplitViewController isn't even possible using a website.
It almost seems like the review team simply launches an app and rejects things without taking the purpose of the app in context.
Now to be fair to Apple, I develop for android too and good lord, they are even worse if your app happens to get caught by their "Artificial Unintelligence". You end up having to deal with a computer without any human on the other side unless you can make enough noise on social media and get some tech blogs to write about you as it happened recently with Droidscript:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956077