How my first Mac app got through App Review, Guideline 2.1 letter and all

The day after I submitted my first Mac app, I came back to my Claude Code session with four words: "Apple rejected the app." It hadn't, quite. App Store Connect did say Rejected, but the reason was Guideline 2.1 (Information Needed, New App Submission): a questionnaire Apple sends some developers whose accounts have little review history. I answered it the same day with a two-minute screen recording and written answers to all six points, resubmitted, and Orbit was approved five days later without another question.

I'm Falcon, a solo developer in Bengaluru. Orbit: Live Sky Desktop is my first Mac app and my first on Apple's store; the free Android version of Orbit came before it. I built it with Claude Code as a pair, and every commit in the repo has Claude as co-author.

Building my first Mac app with Claude Code

On 27 September Claude pulled the Mac App Store's top-paid charts and pitched the real sky as a desktop. I asked what it would show and where the wow was, then said build it, on one condition: it must never slow the Mac down. (Where Orbit itself came from is a longer story, told here.)

The app turns the desktop into the real sky over your city, with a Moon in the menu bar that opens tonight's briefing. The sky is a borderless window behind the desktop icons, since macOS has no live-wallpaper API (how that works). It took nine days to get from that pitch to the upload. On the way, the ground went from a "black bar" to hills, and the briefing card was rebuilt twice before I liked it (that story).

⊕ Inspect the image

A closer look

Actual sizeClose ×

Orbit's briefing card at the top right of a sunset desktop for Los Angeles, Thursday 1 October: tiles for sunrise at 6:48 AM, a 67% waning gibbous Moon, an ISS pass at 7:24 PM with a gold play button, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, a launch countdown of 5d 1h, and Kp 3.0.

The "never slow the Mac down" rule has numbers: under 1% CPU when idle and under 60 MB of memory, because the app is meant to run all day. The card first lived in an NSPopover, the standard Mac speech bubble. On my Mac mini (macOS 27), every open and every close took about 40 MB of graphics memory for under a second and gave it back over the next fifteen seconds.

A popover holding one empty view did the same. On macOS 27 the popover draws its frame inside the app's process through Metal, Apple's graphics layer, so nothing the card did could change that. In a borderless panel of Orbit's own, the same card sat at 28 MB with no spike. Four days later the card's background rings, drawn in a SwiftUI Canvas, brought the spike back:

What the finished app uses, idle and with the card open, is in does a live wallpaper drain your battery.

Two Xcode signing errors before the upload

"unable to build chain to self-signed root"

Xcode made my Apple Development certificate, and then the Mac refused to use it: security find-identity -v -p codesigning reported 0 valid identities, and codesign said "unable to build chain to self-signed root". The Mac had only Apple's old Worldwide Developer Relations intermediate certificate, the one that expired on 7 February 2023.

Newer certificates are signed by the renewed one, listed on Apple's certificate authority page as G3, good until 20 February 2030. Xcode keeps a copy in its own bundle (AppleWWDRCA-2030.cer), and importing it into the login keychain gave one valid identity at once.

"No Account for Team": the wrong Team ID

Then every build, Xcode's own archive included, failed with "No Account for Team" and "no signing certificate with a private key". My certificate's name ends in a 10-character code in brackets, and that code had gone into the project as the Team ID.

It isn't the Team ID. Apple's Team ID is a different code, under Membership details in your developer account. Both are 10 characters long, so nothing looked wrong until Xcode said so. With the real one in, the signed build went through.

Uploading the build and submitting it for review

For a Mac app that needs no provisioning profile in development, like mine, the archive registers nothing with Apple, so the App ID and the app's record in App Store Connect had to exist before the upload. On the listing, the "Sign-in required" box under App Review Information was ticked by default. Orbit has no sign-in, so it came off.

The listing was set to manual release, so the app would go on sale on a day I picked, not the minute Apple approved it.

Until the session before the upload, every build had no icon at all. Three were drawn to choose from, and the first, Orbit's planet with its cyan ring and gold star in the Mac's rounded square, went in as the default.

The export ended with "Uploaded package is processing. Upload succeeded." Build 1.0 (1) was submitted the same day, and it went to Waiting for Review.

Guideline 2.1 Information Needed (New App Submission): what Apple asked

The next day two emails came: "Your App Review Feedback" and "There's an issue with your Orbit: Live Sky Desktop (macOS) submission". Neither said what the issue was. The reason sits on the submission's page in App Store Connect, under App Review, as Apple's App Review page says. App Store Connect marked the submission Rejected, which is where my four words came from.

The heading read Guideline 2.1, Information Needed, New App Submission. The letter said the app came from an account with "limited App Review history" and asked for six things, to be answered in the submission's message thread and copied into the Notes field:

1. A screen recording made on a physical device running the latest OS, starting at launch and showing the typical flow.
2. What the app is for and who it's for.
3. How to set it up and reach the main features.
4. Which outside services it uses.
5. Any regional differences.
6. Whether it's in a regulated industry or uses protected material.

None of that pointed at a fault. Guideline 2.1 itself is about completeness: a final, tested build, with demo login details if the app has a login. It doesn't mention this questionnaire at all. The letter is a form, and the account's short history was the only reason it gave.

Plenty of people get it. On Apple's forums, one developer heard nothing for 12 days after sending all seven items Apple asked for, a screen recording on a physical device among them. Another developer's first iOS app went in on 27 September, was resubmitted on 2 October and was still in Waiting for Review when they posted. Those are two people's stories, not Apple's numbers.

How I answered Guideline 2.1: a screen recording Claude drove

I asked Claude, "can't you drive the thing?", switched on Computer use in the Claude app's settings and gave it Accessibility permission. It clicked through the real app on my Mac mini while macOS's screencapture recorded the screen.

The build under review went into the Applications folder first, so the video opens on a real double-click and the first launch's "Open Orbit at login?" question, answered Not Now. Of the menu's thirteen cities, only Bengaluru and Sydney had a visible ISS pass in the next four days, so the recording went to Bengaluru. The gold play button on the card previewed the pass, and the station crossed the pre-dawn sky on the desktop in twelve seconds. After that came the right-click menu, the pass alerts switch with macOS's notification prompt, and Quit, which put the old wallpaper back.

The first take ran over three minutes. I watched it in QuickTime and said it should start at the launch, and that the end was dead ("just a moon at 13% there, made me sleepy"). The cut started it at the double-click and took out 15 seconds of still day sky after the preview and 47 seconds of looking for the Allow button, leaving 2 minutes 2 seconds at 1920 by 1080.

The first file picked for the attachment was Claude.app.zip. It was cancelled before anything went to Apple, so App Review never received a copy of Claude.

In the Notes field, the written answers came to 3,396 characters of the 4,000 it takes. Boiled down, they said:

• No account, no sign-in, no in-app purchase.
• Three public, read-only feeds: CelesTrak for the station's orbit, The Space Devs' Launch Library 2 for launches, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center for the Kp index.
• Everything else is computed on the Mac.
• No regional differences.
• No regulated industry and no protected material.

Then three clicks: Reply to App Review with the video attached, Update Review on the 1.0 page, Resubmit to App Review. The reply has to go first, because Apple's help page says replies can carry attachments until you resubmit. The letter said a reply alone answers an information request; resubmitting also put the item back in the queue with the new notes.

How long does Apple app review take for a Mac app?

Apple's App Review page says it typically reviews at least 50% of submissions in under 24 hours and 90% in under 48 hours. That figure is for all submissions together. Mine was a first app from a new account, and it went like this:

On 10 October, three days into the silence, I said, "I feel like Apple's gonna reject it on the basis of it being too basic." The guideline for that fear is 4.2, Minimum Functionality, for apps that don't do enough to belong on the store. Apple never raised it.

The plan had been to ask App Review for a status if nothing arrived by 14 October; it never came to that. I didn't ask for an expedited review either, which Apple keeps for "extenuating circumstances" like a critical bug fix. In those forum threads, one developer tried the expedite form and was told "You don't have a submission in review". The other got a request in and was still waiting when they posted.

Pending Developer Release: approved, and then nothing

With manual release, approval puts nothing on sale. The version moves to Pending Developer Release and waits for someone to click Release This Version; Apple's release options page says Apple emails a reminder if a version waits there more than 30 days.

The two approval emails, "Welcome to the App Store" and "Review of your Orbit: Live Sky Desktop (macOS) submission is complete", came five days after the resubmission. On 17 October I opened my next session with "Apple finally approved our app for the Mac-OS", and a Gmail search turned up both mails. Later that day it was "Orbit Launch is a GO". When Claude suggested sending Apple an update before the big launch push, I said no: "I just got the Mac App approved, I can't file for another revision."

The release took two clicks, and they weren't mine. I'd signed in to App Store Connect in Edge, linked Claude in Chrome and asked: "I need you to publish the app for me and show me the steps so I can do it myself next time." Claude clicked Release This Version. A sheet asked "Release macOS app on the App Store in 175 countries or regions?" One more click, and about four seconds later the left column read "1.0 Ready for Distribution".

Apple says a release can take up to 24 hours to show up. Orbit was on the store by 18 October, at $6.99 (₹699 in India). The day after that I was back, "low-key proud", asking which paid Mac app to build next.

What I'd tell anyone shipping a first Mac app

Orbit: Live Sky Desktop draws the real sky over your chosen city on your desktop and redraws it once a minute, pausing whenever the desktop is hidden. Tonight's Moon sits in the menu bar with the briefing card under it, and during a visible pass the ISS crosses the desktop. The price is $6.99 once, no subscription, for macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon and Intel.

Here's a pass over New York as Orbit draws it, about seven minutes of sky in under 18 seconds. It's a demonstration from the app's renderer, not a live pass.

The screenshots and the measurements are on the Mac page.