Launching auto-renewable subscriptions on the App Store is not just a product or pricing decision. It is also a compliance milestone—and many apps only discover this when their binary gets rejected. This article documents a real rejection we encountered while submitting LingoBoard, why it happened, and how we resolved it to successfully pass App Store review. The Rejection: Guideline 3.1.2 – Business – Payments – Subscriptions During LingoBoard’s App Store submission, the app was rejected under Guideline 3.1.2, with the following message:

For a long time, I treated growth and marketing as the same thing. More channels. More distribution. More content, ads, posts, experiments. When growth stalled, my instinct was always to look outward. What I eventually learned was uncomfortable: If a product doesn’t grow by itself, marketing only makes the failure louder. Early growth problems rarely come from traffic In early-stage products, traffic is almost never the real bottleneck. What usually breaks growth happens much earlier:

When I first added monetization to my product, I treated it as a pricing problem. Monthly or yearly? $4.99 or $9.99? A clean paywall, a polished Pro page, and a subscribe button. Everything worked exactly as designed — except the revenue. Users were active. Engagement was fine. But conversion was consistently low. Nothing was “broken,” yet something was clearly wrong. It took me a while to realize the mistake: I didn’t have a monetization problem. I had a product decision problem.