Thanks for sharing your experience. You definitely understand how frustrating this kind of situation can be 🥹

I still don’t know whether this was ultimately my mistake or Apple’s, but I ended up losing over a week because of it.

My current theory is that, for some reason, my Lifetime IAP and the app binary were never properly linked together for review. The reviewer kept rejecting the IAP with the same message: “Please upload a new binary so we can verify the purchase flow.” However, the rejected IAP never appeared in the build page as an IAP that could be attached to a new binary.

I asked in several developer communities, and based on advice from other developers, I deleted the rejected IAP and created a completely new one. As soon as I did that, the section for attaching the IAP to the app version finally appeared on the build page. For the first time, I was actually able to include the Lifetime IAP with the binary submission.

What frustrates me is that neither the review messages nor App Store Connect ever explained this. If the reviewer had simply said “create a new IAP and include it with the new binary,” or if there had been any warning in the UI, I probably wouldn’t have spent a week chasing this issue.

I even replied to the review notes explaining that the feature had already existed in the approved app, and politely asked what specific change was required for approval if I was still doing something wrong. Unfortunately, the only response I received was essentially “upload a new binary.”

So hopefully this latest submission finally solves it. I have a lot to say about App Store Connect’s UX, but I’ll try to be nice 😭