Your App Subscriptions Got Stuck on “Waiting for Review” on Apple — The cause, how to prevent it, and the solution.

Everybody knows that getting on the app store and publishing new apps is much harder than publishing them on Android and Google play store, mainly because Apple has very strict guidelines to allow apps to be published on the App Store.

During this struggle, you will get a huge bug that Apple looks like not intend to fix for the developer community, which is all of your subscription products will get stuck on one status, and you can’t resubmit them for review or cancel them and submit new ones for review, because the new ones will get stuck also on the same status, and from my experience with this bug some of them will get stuck under “Ready of Review”.

What makes matters even worse is that you will receive an email from Apple that all your subscription products are approved, like the following email, but in the app store connect, they will not.

All that I am going to discuss here is based on my own conclusions and my experience solving this bug, please don’t think of it as an official reference, and your situation may be different from mine, but I recommend that you try the solution, it may also work for you.

For developers based in the USA:

If you are based in the USA, then there is a place where you can ask Apple Developer Support to give a callback, and I heard many stories that people got this issue solved in a matter of hours after Apple called them and explained what’s happening with them to Apple.

However, for the rest who do not have this option and can only contact Apple by email only, the process will take a lot more.

The Cause:

For my particular situation, I believe that the main issue for me was using a trademark inside the description of the subscription, and what happened is that the reviewer on the App Store Connect either missed it or didn’t have access to see it. And it seems that Apple has an internal system to check the subscription names and descriptions for trademark words, so when this happened, the subscriptions got stuck, and this bug happened.

There are maybe other situations where the subscription will get stuck, depending on your own situation, but I believe that paraphrasing the title and description of the subscription and then going for the solution can help.

How to prevent subscriptions from getting stuck:

When you are submitting your first subscription in App Store Connect for an app, I strongly recommend that you use simple words in the subscription products of the first submission.

After that, you want to use something different or try edge cases, you can do so, but at your own risk. I have not tried that extensively to be sure it will not affect the approved ones.

The Solution:

The solution for this is rather simple but needs some time, and this is how I got it solved.

First, I contacted App Store Developer Support, and the waiting time for a reply was four days. And I got the situation resolved in 3 interactions with Apple, so it took 12 days to be solved.

Second, I edited the title and description of all the subscriptions and then submitted a new version of the app without any changes at all. HERE, add a note to the submission that the subscriptions were approved by email, and then it’s showing “Waiting for review” on app store connect.

Usually, the review process for my app takes around 15–30 minutes, and I will get a reply from Apple. However, this time with this note, the review took more than 2 and a half days. And then, it got rejected for a reason that is very easy to solve, and I think this rejection was intentional because it was minor. I solved it and changed the title and description of the subscriptions again. But this time, after changing the subscription details, the “Submit for review” button got active, and I could submit the subscriptions for review. So, after like 6 hours of submitting the subscriptions for review, they got approved and started working also on older published versions of the app.

I had a version pending review that had no changes, only to get the subscriptions approved, so I canceled it, and nothing happened, and everything is fine now.

That’s it folks; I hope that will help you also; feel free to ask me anything if you need more details.