WakeWin is finally on the App Store. Here's what App Review made me cut.
Disclosure up front: WakeWin is mine. I'm building it alongside LeadGrid and Nalurio (some of you tried to talk me out of that back in July).
It went live yesterday. It's a free iOS alarm you can't turn off from bed. When it rings, the app names an everyday object, like the sink or the kettle. You walk over and photograph it, an AI check confirms it, then you do a short set of puzzles. Getting up earns tickets, and on Premium they go into a monthly draw.
Getting here took a lot of rejections. Three of them changed the product:
Internet radio, Guideline 5.2.3. You could wake up to a live station. Apple wanted third-party streaming rights I didn't have. I appealed and the App Review Board upheld it. Radio is now switched off on iOS in code, not with a remote flag, because a feature you can turn back on remotely counts as a hidden feature under 2.3.1.
What replaced it is better. There are 11 licensed instrumental tracks bundled in the app, each with its own licence proof pack, all at the same loudness, plus a "random song" mode that never plays the same track two mornings in a row. It's free, it works offline, and nobody can pull the rights out from under me.
Crash on launch on iOS 27, 2.1(a), last week. Xcode Cloud had quietly moved to the iOS 27 SDK, and iOS 27 won't launch an app built with that SDK unless it uses the UIScene life cycle. iOS 26 only logs a warning, so it ran fine on our phones. The fix was bumping Capacitor to 8.5.2 and adding a SceneDelegate. If your CI builds with "latest Xcode", check this before your next submission.
I also made the photo check free for everyone. It's the core of the app.
If you're on iOS 26, I'd love blunt feedback on the first run: https://apps.apple.com/app/wakewin/id6762138045
What's the worst rejection you've had, and did it make your product better or just smaller?
Honestly, the interesting part is that the rejections forced you to make some parts of the product stronger rather than just removing features. Making the photo check free especially makes sense since it’s the core interaction. I’d be curious to see what users actually do during their first few mornings, because that could reveal more than the initial feedback.
I can relate to this. I worked on a client project that got rejected around 10 times before we finally got it through App Review.
Some of the feedback actually made the app better, but there were also a few changes that felt like we were just trying to satisfy the review process.
Anyway Congrats on getting WakeWin through!
This is great work — reminds me of some of the calls I've had to make building Xstream4K. What would you do differently if you started over?