I worked on App Store review for over a decade and have seen most rejection patterns repeat. I can’t bypass guidelines, but I can explain how reviewers think and what actually helps.

Hey all. I shipped a small iOS app in late March called \*\*SpeakCove\*\* — a document-to-speech reader (PDF, ePub, DOCX, MOBI, FB2, HTML, plain text) with on-device neural voices. Everything runs offline, no accounts, no tracking. Built it because I kept wanting to listen to PDFs on walks and hated that every decent TTS reader was either subscription-locked or phoning home with my documents. [apps.apple.com/.../id6760540041](apps.apple.com/.../id6760540041) if you're curious. 1.0 shipped fine. Then I submitted \*\*1.1.0 on April 3rd\*\* with voice quality improvements and some UX fixes. It went "In Review" on \*\*April 6th\*\*. Today is April 24th and it's still there. No rejection, no communication, nothing: preview.redd.it/.../cnmoqp4l86xg1.png 18 days of radio silence on a minor update feels off, especially when 1.0 went through normally and the app has no server-side component for Apple to even scrutinize. A few questions for anyone who's been here: 1. Has App Review gotten noticeably slower/quieter in the last month or two for anyone else? 2. What's actually worked to get a stuck review moving — formal escalation form, phone support, something else? 3. Is there any signal in the timing itself (e.g. "if it's been 14+ days, it's usually flagged for something specific")? Should I cancel and resubmit? I'm afraid to start at the very beginning of the queue again :(