I look forward to this app now being approved because getting a viral post on reddit/HN/Twitter is what passes for customer service in 2026.

What an insane ruling considering Co-Star is entirely an astrology app and was picked as an app store "Editor's Choice" at some point.

I am quite an Apple fan, but this dampens my enthusiasm considerably.

How many great apps are rejected, but build by people without reach?

Is astrology not allowed in app store? That's kind of a weird thing to ban.

as much as i loathe astrology, im not sure why astrology would be blanket banned in the first place.

and i am surprised that apps like "Night Sky" (great app, no affiliation) made it past review if the app store reviewers are incapable of telling the difference.

https://darkhours.io/ does look really cool, i hope they get this sorted out.

I wonder what the internals of the App Store process are. For most app approval processes you can tell because you'll get connections from the Philippines etc. so I assume what's going on here is that these reviewers have a range of English proficiency with a median below what an American developer is used to. Then the rest is just hallucination from the human, guessing at what they're looking at.

Reject this, but allow a billion spammy gambling scam apps pride of place in App Store searches. Gross.

In my last SRE role I was the unfortunate victim of having to maintain a mobile app submitted to both the Android and iOS app stores. I would never wish it on my worst enemy. It was the one thing that I could absolutely _not_ guarantee any sort of reliability with. It was all up to the random person who happened to review the current release and the release process could be as quick as a day in the best circumstances or up to two weeks if we got a particularly difficult reviewer. They seem to have absolutely no context sharing between reviews.