Unfortunately, we have been struggling with this for almost a year now. Since 2013, we have released a series of Oracle Cards and Guided Meditations apps (you can see examples of our apps here: www.indie-goes.com). Last September, Apple began to refuse apps updates, asking us to consolidate them. We tried to negotiate with an Apple representative, but with limited success. We only obtained to be able to update our apps till December 2017, which allowed us to implement some features in our single apps for a smoother transition to the consolidated one. For example, we wanted to enable our users to transfer their purchases from single apps to the new portal. We also wanted to display a message in the single apps about the new portal, so people were aware of this new model. We spent almost 6 months working hard on a consolidated app for our oracle cards decks. It was really challenging on many levels: business, technical, design and marketing. We even had to setup a web server and some web services for in-app purchases migration between apps. We released our new consolidated app on Feb 2018. Now our single apps are still on sale on the store, but we can't update them any longer, which is very frustrating (for example Facebook updated some security stuff, and we won't be able to update the code, which will break this feature). And our users still globally prefer to download our single apps than get the consolidated one, by the way, because that's just more obvious to them . Yesterday we submitted a brand new app based on numerology, and we hoped that it would be accepted as it is not based on the same principle as cards. We tried to make the app as different as possible from the rest. But it was rejected in 5 minutes after the review began, for spam design policy. I wrote to our Apple contact, but no reply yet. This is preposterous. We are absolutely not the kind of spammers who upload 10 versions of Solitaire or Flappy Bird to saturate the store. We always create original, carefully crafted apps. But the review team doesn't seem to care, and if your apps vaguely resemble each other, they'll ask you to put them all into one, which doesn't make any sense. It's even worse if each app is associated with a different brand, as you simply can't put them all inside the same app from a marketing point of view. There is one thing that is even more disgusting: yesterday I checked my competitors apps, and they keep publishing and updating oracle cards apps that are exactly clones of each other, with just varying text and content (which is the exact definition of design spam, according to Apple). Last week they updated 24 of their identical apps without any issue. But since our competitors are bigger players, it seems they had the right to continue publishing apps, which is terribly unfair. Our business got hit hard by this, and we had to postpone many projects to migrate to the consolidated model. When we see that our competitors can still publish and update products that show the exact same issues that caused problems for us, we are very upset (and this is an understatement). Frankly I'm sorry for you, and I wish you to find a solution with Apple. I think you'll have to ask for an Apple representative to contact you, so you can see that issue with them. Best of luck, you're not alone.
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