I got tired of guessing what Apple App Review would flag, so I made a small metadata preflight tool

A few days ago I shared some patterns I noticed after getting multiple App Review rejections around metadata wording.

What caught me off guard wasn’t just that the rejections were repetitive — it was how tiny wording differences (especially around AI, automation, or system-level behavior) kept triggering review loops, even when the actual app didn’t change.

After a few of these cycles I started doing something very un-“indie”:
I wrote down every rejected phrase, every reviewer comment, and every version that eventually passed.

That slowly turned into a checklist I ran before each submission.

Eventually I threw that checklist into a small web tool that scans App Store metadata and flags phrases that tend to cause review friction — not based on the guidelines, but on how reviewers seem to react in practice.

It’s pretty simple, but it already saved me from at least one rejection I would have walked into out of habit.

If anyone here is stuck in slow or confusing App Review loops, this might save you a few days of back-and-forth:

👉 https://preflight-review-web.vercel.app

Curious if others here have noticed similar “metadata traps”, or if you’ve built your own ways to de-risk submissions.