Rejected, resubmitted, rejected again: the in-app purchase deadlock

There is a specific, miserable loop that catches people submitting their first app with subscriptions. It looks like this:

1. You submit your app with its subscriptions attached. It gets rejected, for anything.
2. You fix what the rejection asked for and press Resubmit to App Review.
3. It gets rejected again, for a reason that reads like Apple never saw your subscriptions at all. Something like Guideline 2.1(b): the app offers purchases that weren't submitted for review.
4. You check your subscriptions. They look fine. You resubmit. Same rejection.

Developers report going two or three rounds through this before spotting what's happening, at up to a week of review wait per round. One waited 18 days in review only to land back in the same loop.

What's actually happening

When a submission that contains in-app purchases is rejected, the purchases are detached from the submission. Apple doesn't announce this anywhere in the rejection message. The app version stays locked inside the rejected submission, and the only obvious action, "Resubmit to App Review", sends the version alone, without the purchases.

So the resubmission genuinely doesn't include your subscriptions, and the 2.1(b)-style rejection is, in its own maddening way, correct.

It gets worse if you try to fix it the intuitive way: adding the subscriptions back creates a separate draft submission, which can't be submitted, because it has no app version in it. The version is still trapped in the rejected submission. That's the deadlock, and it's also why people searching "unable to submit for review, add an app version" end up so confused: App Store Connect is asking for a version that's locked somewhere else.

The way out

The fix, confirmed independently by multiple developers:

1. Delete the rejected submission entirely. Not resubmit: delete. This releases the app version.
2. Create a new submission.
3. Add the build and every subscription to it together, before pressing submit.

The order matters less than the togetherness: the submission Apple reviews must contain the version and the purchases in one package.

One more thing, offered honestly at the confidence it deserves: a single developer reported that a draft which refused to accept an app version unblocked after they reordered their subscription group so the yearly plan sat above the monthly plan. That's one report, not documentation, but it's free to try and reversible, so if you're stuck at that exact step, try it before anything drastic.

How to not land here again

• Before every submission, check that your purchases are attached. After any rejection, assume they aren't; Apple detached them, even though nothing told you so.
• First subscription of each group rides with an app version. New subscriptions can't go through review on their own until their group has been through once; they need to be added to a version submission. Our guide on attaching subscriptions to a version submission walks through where that lives in App Store Connect.
• Fix everything the rejection listed before resubmitting. The loop is bad enough once; combining it with a second rejection reason costs another review round.

This is exactly the kind of problem the free check exists for: after a rejection it reads your actual submission and tells you whether your purchases are still attached, before you spend another week finding out the hard way.