We were about to build a document scanner. Good demand, clear keywords, obvious monetisation. Then we checked our own catalogue and found that our PDF app already scanned documents — which turned a promising idea into a review risk against ourselves.
What 4.3 actually says
App Store Review Guideline 4.3 covers spam. Two halves matter, and developers usually only worry about the first:
- 4.3(a) Copycats — submitting an app that duplicates another app already on the store, particularly with the same content or functionality and only cosmetic differences.
- 4.3(b) Saturation — flooding a category with minor variations of the same thing.
The part that surprises people: the app you are duplicating can be your own. Multiple apps from one developer that do essentially the same job are exactly the pattern the rule exists to catch, and "but they are both mine" is not a defence.
How we walked into it
The scanner idea looked clean on its own. Scanning is a genuine job people search for, and a focused app can beat a general one.
Then the awkward question: what would it do that our existing PDF app does not? Camera capture, edge detection, OCR, export — all already shipped, in an app already live. The honest answer was "a different icon and a keyword we want to rank for." That is precisely the description of a 4.3 rejection.
The cost of finding out at review time is not just the rejection. Repeated 4.3 flags attract scrutiny across an entire developer account, and an account with a pattern gets slower reviews on everything.
The test we use now
Before any new app, one question: what job does this do that nothing in our catalogue already does? If the answer needs more than a sentence, or leans on "but for a different audience," it is a feature, not an app.
Three outcomes follow from that question:
- The job is genuinely new — build it.
- The job overlaps but the audience is truly distinct and the interface would be fundamentally different — proceed carefully, and expect to justify it.
- The job is already done by an existing app — build it into that app instead. It makes the existing app better, which is where retention comes from anyway.
The related trap: cloning someone else
The other half of this is the "find a successful expensive app and make a cheaper better one" strategy. It sounds efficient and it is the most direct route to 4.3(a) there is.
The distinction that matters is between competing and copying. Solving the same problem differently is competition and the store is full of it. Reproducing an app's structure, flow and feature set with a different colour scheme is copying, and reviewers see enough of it to recognise it quickly.