Vibe-coding gets you a working demo, but it often stops short of passing a human reviewer at Apple or Google Play. According to Mikalai Siliuk in How to Publish Vibe Coded App to App Store After AI Built It, the wall you hit is rarely an obscure bug; it is an unanswered question about permissions, third-party packages, or data collection that no prompt can answer for you. If you are trying to push an AI-generated app through review, you need a quick audit of the codebase before clicking submit.
Here is a ten-minute checklist you can run on your own project to find out how bad your review situation actually is:
- Check bundled dependencies for undeclared SDKs. Look through your package files to see what third-party packages the AI pulled in. Apple and Google privacy manifests require you to declare what these packages collect and phone home to.
- Audit your permission requests. Search your codebase for camera, location, or contacts access. If a generated feature required them once but got cut later, reviewers will flag the leftover permission immediately.
- Verify your privacy manifest and data safety form. Fill out your iOS privacy manifest and Android Data Safety form with precise answers about data collection. Vague forms read as evasive to human reviewers.
- Inspect your build wrapper. If you built a web app using tools like Lovable and wrapped it in a native shell with Capacitor, check if it meets minimum native functionality rules or risk a guideline 4.2 rejection for a repackaged website.
- Test your ability to explain the data flow. Ask yourself if you can explain every network call and third-party service in plain language. If nobody on your team can vouch for the codebase, you are looking at a manual read-through or a focused audit before resubmitting.
Fixing your codebase architecture before handing it to a reviewer prevents a string of cryptic rejections. When your foundation is solid, building out robust interfaces becomes straightforward rather than a guessing game.