Guideline 2.3.10: The Metadata Rejection Explained
Pavlo Rubanovskyi
August 21, 2026 · 6 min read
Your code is fine. Your description is not.
Teams brace for review as if it were a technical audit. In practice a large share of first-submission rejections never touch the binary — they come from the text and images around it, and Guideline 2.3.10 is the one that catches the most people.
The rule, in short: metadata must be relevant to the app. What "relevant" excludes is broader than it sounds.
What actually trips it
| Trigger | Typical form |
|---|---|
| Another platform named | "Also on Android", "Get it on Google Play", a Play badge in a screenshot |
| Competitor or brand names | Rival app names used as keywords, unlicensed trademarks |
| Placeholder text | Lorem ipsum, "TODO", a template line left in a localisation |
| Pricing and promotions | "50% off this week" in the description — pricing belongs in App Store Connect |
| Screenshots that are not the app | Marketing collage, a device frame from the other platform, unshipped features |
| Future promises | "Coming soon: multiplayer" for something not in this build |
The one that catches studios shipping cross-platform is the first. A single "Android" in a support URL, a Play Store badge left in the fifth screenshot, a shared marketing description reused across both stores — any of these is enough.
Why localised listings are the worst offenders
The English listing gets read carefully. The other nine get pasted in and forgotten.
That is where placeholder text survives, where a translated description keeps the English "available on Google Play" line, and where a screenshot set never got re-exported after the UI changed. Review checks the localisations too, and a rejection on the Portuguese listing blocks the whole submission — not just that language.
A pre-submission pass that takes ten minutes
1. Search every localisation for the other platform. "Android", "Google Play", "Play Store", "iOS", "App Store" — depending on which way you are shipping. Include the support and marketing URLs, not only the description. 2. Open every screenshot at full size. Look for the other platform's status bar, navigation gestures, or store badges. Cross-platform screenshot generators produce these silently. 3. Grep for template residue. lorem, TODO, XXX, PLACEHOLDER, your internal project codename. 4. Remove every price and promotion from descriptive text. 5. Check that each screenshot shows a feature that exists in the build you are submitting. Not the roadmap.
Why we automated it
We ship to both stores often enough that doing this by hand across every localisation stopped scaling. So Larko does it: it audits a listing across storefronts in parallel and flags 2.3.10 risks — other-platform references, placeholder text, mismatched claims — alongside byte-exact keyword limits, before the submission goes in.
A rejection is rarely fatal. It is a week, at the point in a project where a week is most expensive: the build is finished, the launch date is announced, and nobody can do anything but resubmit and wait.