How many apps does Apple actually reject?
Apple rejected 2,093,244 submissions in 2025, out of 9,100,620 reviewed — about 23%.
It also approved 387,087 apps after an initial rejection. Source: Apple's own App Store Transparency Report.
Rejections by guideline section, 2025
Bars are scaled to the largest category. Section counts sum to more than the rejection total because a single submission can violate several guidelines at once — Apple notes this in the report.
What this actually tells you
Performance dominates. Crashes, broken builds, unusable demo accounts — guideline 2.1 territory — cause more rejections than every other section combined. This is at odds with developer folklore, which treats 4.3 spam as the great villain. 4.3 generates more anguish; 2.1 generates more rejections.
Legal is second. That section contains 5.1.1 privacy and account deletion, and 5.1.2 data sharing — the checks that are mechanical, unglamorous, and entirely preventable before submission.
Rejection is usually recoverable. 387,087 apps approved after initial rejection is a large number. A rejection is a round trip, not a verdict — but each round trip is a week of your release schedule.
Other figures from the report
| Metric | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Apps on the App Store | 2,172,472 |
| Submissions reviewed | 9,100,620 |
| Submissions rejected | 2,093,244 |
| Approved after initial rejection | 387,087 |
| Apps removed from the App Store | 166,899 |
shipcheck. "How many apps does Apple actually reject?." Baker Ventures LLC, September 4, 2026. https://shipcheck.bakerventuresstudio.com/app-store-rejection-statistics