Apple Just Added an Eviction Clause to the App Store Lease

My landlord doesn’t care that I paid rent on time for three straight years. If I stop paying, or if I trash the place, the lease is over. What I never expected is for the same logic to show up in the App Store.

For eighteen years, Apple’s review process worked one way: it judged you once, at the door. Pass review, get in, and — barring an actual violation — you basically got to stay forever. Ship an app in 2019, never touch it again, and it could still be sitting there in 2026, silently collecting its 30% cut from the three people who still open it.

That deal just changed. As of the June 2026 guidelines update, Apple can now evict you.

The new clause: “ongoing merit”

Buried in the App Store Review Guidelines refresh Apple announced at WWDC 2026 is a change that’s a lot bigger than it sounds. Apps can now be removed — not rejected, removed, after they’re already live — if Apple decides they’re “not updated, improved, or [do] not attract customers.”

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that gatekeeping used to be entirely front-loaded. You got reviewed once, at submission. After that, unless you did something that got you banned outright, you were left alone. This is the first time Apple has formalized the idea that an app has to keep earning its spot, not just win it once.

Three guideline sections carry the weight here:

4.3(b) — the core “low-quality and duplicate apps” rule, now explicitly extended to apps that are already published, not just new submissions.
1.2 — user-generated-content apps now need “a plan to improve compliance” when problems show up, or risk removal until they can prove it.
4.5.3 — tighter restrictions on Live Activity spam, which is its own small war Apple’s clearly tired of fighting.

Six categories got called out by name as the current test cases: dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpapers, simple timers, and fortune telling. If you’re shipping in any of those, Apple now expects “meaningfully different or better,” not “same thing, cleaner UI.” That second phrase isn’t me paraphrasing for effect — it’s close to the actual standard, and it’s deliberately squishy.

The part that should actually worry you

Here’s what I keep coming back to: there’s no published threshold.

No “under 100 downloads a month for two quarters.” No “no update in 400 days.” Nothing you can point to and say “I’m safely on the right side of this line.” The reporting I dug through repeats the same phrase from different angles — “not updated, improved, or do not attract customers” — and then stops. Apple’s own guidelines don’t specify a notification process for these removals, either. Historically, when Apple has been vague about a process, developers have found out about it by having it happen to them.

That’s a genuinely different risk model than “my app got rejected for guideline 2.1, here’s the resubmission checklist.” A rejection is a conversation. A removal, with no defined warning window, is a fact you discover in App Store Connect.

I’ve written before about how Apple invented the gym membership for App Store subscriptions — a policy with actual, published numbers (12-month commitment, specific billing rules) you could plan around. This is the opposite. It’s a vibe, backed by an enforcement mechanism.

Why this actually lands on indie developers, not just spam farms

The categories named — flashlight, wallpaper, fortune telling — read like Apple is aiming at the bottom of the barrel. Fine. Nobody’s crying for the fortieth identical flashlight app.

But “ongoing merit” as a doctrine doesn’t stay confined to six categories. It’s a general principle now written into the guidelines, and general principles have a way of expanding to fill the room they’re given.

I currently have apps live across a handful of different niches — ThinkBud for studying, RoleBud for job applications, PromptKit for managing AI prompts, Invoize for invoicing. I wrote a whole post about optimizing build times because I’m juggling five-plus apps at once — and that number, which used to just be a mild flex about DerivedData size, is now also a small liability. Every app on that list is a separate surface Apple can decide isn’t earning its keep.

None of mine are in the six named categories. That’s not the same as being safe. It’s being safe today, under a standard nobody has fully defined yet.

What you can actually do about a rule with no numbers

You can’t comply with a threshold that doesn’t exist. But you can stack the deck:

Ship updates on a cadence, even small ones. A changelog that says “bug fixes and performance improvements” every few months is a weak signal, but it’s a signal. An app frozen at build 1.0 from two years ago is the exact profile this policy describes.

Don’t let an app go quiet in a saturated category. If you’ve got a side-project timer app or a wallpaper app sitting untouched, that’s the one to look at first — not because it’s bad, but because it’s the shape of app this update was written for.

Watch App Store Connect analytics like you’d watch a smoke detector, not a vanity metric. Zero downloads for months in a crowded category is now a removal signal, not just a discouraging chart.

If you’re not going to maintain it, pull it yourself. A voluntary removal is a clean decision on your terms. An Apple-initiated one is a data point on theirs, and repeated low-quality submissions can apparently escalate all the way to losing your developer account entirely — a much bigger problem than one dead app.

I already went through App Store Connect for every app I have live and checked build dates against this list. It’s a fifteen-minute task that’s worth doing before you’re the one reading about your own app in a rejection email instead of a blog post.

The takeaway

Apple spent nearly two decades treating App Store approval like a one-time background check. As of this year, it’s closer to a lease you have to keep renewing, with an inspection you don’t get to schedule.

If you’re building solo or maintaining more than one app, this isn’t a five-alarm fire. It’s a nudge to actually look at the apps you haven’t opened in App Store Connect in a while — before Apple looks first. For more on what Apple’s review process actually expects at submission time, our App Store Preparation lesson covers the pre-submission checklist this update is quietly raising the bar on. And if you want the other side of the App Store-in-2026 story — the sheer volume problem Apple’s also fighting — the review queue post is the companion piece to this one.

Keep the lights on. Apple’s checking now.