I make a small iOS receipt scanner (on-device OCR, then parsing). It worked fine on my own Canadian receipts. Then users in the Netherlands, Japan and Malaysia showed up and it fell apart in ways I couldn't reproduce, because I had no receipts from those countries.

Finding test data was the hard part. What I ended up with:

• Japan: 1,148 photos from a public research set (JaWildText). Before testing on them, my yen handling paired an item with its price on 19% of receipts. After: 93%. I had no idea it was that broken.
• Malaysia: 973 from SROIE (an ICDAR 2019 competition set). Old, and heavy on restaurants, but real.
• US: 1,769 from WildReceipt. Mixed quality, some are not even US receipts, but it is the largest English set I found.
• Netherlands: 74 photos from one user who sent them for debugging, with permission. That is the only real Dutch set I have.
• Taiwan: zero real photos. I had to generate 40 synthetic 統一發票 from the printed layout. I know that is weak.

Things I learned:

1. Public receipt datasets are old, and skewed to whatever the original paper needed. Nobody publishes a fresh, balanced, multi-country set because receipts are personal data.
2. Thermal receipts fade. Half of my own "test set" from a trip a year ago is unreadable now.
3. I never ask users for receipts. The few I have came unprompted, from bug reports.
4. Measuring beat training. I did not fine-tune anything. A harness that runs every rule change against all sets and refuses if any correct total flips caught two regressions the same day, one of which broke 18 of 119 Japanese totals while fixing the case I was working on.
5. Every country has a printing convention that a "generic" parser gets wrong: yen with no decimals, Dutch comma decimals, Japanese tax-included versus tax-excluded lines, US tips added after the total.

Question for people who have done this: is there any public receipt dataset for Taiwan, Korea, or Australia? Or a legal, non-creepy way to get a few hundred real receipts from a country you don't live in?

(Not linking the app. Happy to share the harness approach in comments if useful.)

Hi everyone,

I have an iPhone camera app called FilmFold. Versions 1.0 and 1.1 were approved, but the 1.2 update has now been rejected several times under Guideline 4.3(a), Design and Spam.

Apple says the app shares a similar binary, metadata, or concept with apps submitted by me or other developers. The problem is that they do not identify what is similar. Every reply I receive is basically the same guideline text.

This is an update under the same App Store record and bundle identifier. FilmFold is the only app in my developer account. It is not a template or white-label app, I have never submitted it from another account, and the source repository is private.

FilmFold has 22 original virtual cameras. Each one has its own interface, optics, focal range, aspect ratio, color processing and behavior. The app also has custom native photo and video processing, lenses, accessories, double exposure and a local library that preserves the original media for later reprocessing.

The approved 1.1 version already had the 22 cameras, continuous zoom and the current adjustment interface.

The rejected 1.2 build added major native processing changes for three video cameras: Tape 99 Hi8, Warm 8 and Cine 35. It also added migration support for videos created in previous versions.

The biggest non-product difference is that 1.2 also added:

- RevenueCat for purchase entitlements

- RevenueCat's remotely configured paywall, offerings and placements

- Meta App Events and attribution

- App Tracking Transparency support

- EAS Update through `expo-updates`

I am not saying these SDKs violate 4.3(a). They are legitimate and widely used. I am wondering if one of them, a shared SDK resource, a remote paywall configuration, or an account identifier could have triggered an automated similarity check.

I have asked Apple to compare 1.2 with the approved 1.1 binary and to tell me whether the issue is related to code, assets, metadata or functionality. They continue to send the same generic response.

I have now prepared a new build, but I have not submitted it. It removes RevenueCat, the RevenueCat paywall, Meta, ATT and `expo-updates`. Purchases are handled directly through StoreKit again, using FilmFold's own paywall. The actual camera improvements remain.

Has anyone had a similar experience with an update to an existing app?

1. Did RevenueCat, a remote paywall, Meta SDK or another common SDK ever cause a 4.3(a) problem for you?
2. How did you get Apple to explain what was considered similar?
3. Did removing the SDKs solve it?
4. Did a formal appeal or App Review phone call help?
5. Would you submit the cleaned build first or appeal the rejected build before replacing it?

I would really appreciate hearing from anyone who has actually resolved a similar rejection.

Edit: I ended up buying the tracks as I had to build enough karma to be able to post here which took a few days but still keen to get the communities inputs.
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I’m building a breath work app at present and a key part of the experience means I’ll need background music. I’ve embedded some tracks from the site Free to Use; reading the fine print makes it clear I’ll need to either get a paid subscription, or get single track licenses at 50 pounds per song.

The app will be free with a subscription tier for additional features including an expanded soundtrack.

I have immensely enjoyed building the app, so either way I feel like this has been a rewarding and beneficial exercise for me regardless of whether it makes any sales or not.

At a minimum, I’ll need 4 tracks so I’m looking at an outlay of 200 pounds for the music. If i go with a subscription, it will be about 100 pounds per year. I’m leaning towards just getting the licenses for the tracks, but wanted to check in here first if others have gone with other options where they’ve needed backing music?

The quality and fit of the music I believe is a critical part of the app experience so I won’t be able to compromise on music quality.

I’m also a big believer in getting the product into the hands of users so I can iterate and focus my attention on areas that become clear are valuable for users, so I don’t want to overthink this and am close to pulling the trigger on this approach.

Are there any options I’m missing that I should be considering? Many thanks,

I dont understand . They keep asking for information that doesnt even exist such as SEID for my mac and macbook? I have given these people everything and apart from super late emails telling me to "recreate" the problem im not sure what else i can do. this is beyond frustrating. they have my IDs and every bit of information imaginable . so frustrated

Have an iMac from many years ago that I got out of storage and was backing up the files so it could eventually be recycled and such. It was as I was going through files, however, that I saw that there were backed up .ipa files from a bunch of apps, all belonging to an old iPod Touch that used to run on iOS 5 and then later on iOS 7. Most of them were nostalgic little applications I would buy and play back then and are ones that I can't seem to find on the App Store anymore, probably in part that it was developed on very outdated software.

However, that got me wondering: I might not have an old Apple device where these .ipa files could be loaded onto to see if they run. But I do know that there are people who have successfully made ports of older apps so they could run on a desktop or an emulator for archival purposes. Not sure, though, if this worked also with .ipa games in the same way that computer-centric game files (such as .swf) did. If it is, I'd really like to know how I could go about doing exactly this: Decompiling the contents of the .ipa that was saved on the iMac and potentially creating a port of it for desktop or other devices, since that iPod these games and apps used to be used on is no longer working.

Anyone willing to help a complete novice in this out and let me know if this can be done? Apologies in advance if this is a ridiculous or stupid question, or if my ambitions to do something like this are too high.