App Store Review Issues - Cordova App doesn't connect during Review

Hi, this is a kind of weird one.

For the second time now we have this issue where our app doesn’t go through the app store review.

We try to get all our ducks in a row before of course, and the app runs fine with the testflight version of the same build. It never has this issue except during App Store Reviews apparently.

The issues is this: Apparently the app can’t connect to the server from the reviewers’ environment.

We can see that there ist a “VPN” icon in the top right corner of the device they’re using in the screenshots they give us. But besides that we have no clue, no indicator what could go wrong.

The first time this happened, in august last year, we did basically nothing but replied something or another, and they tested it again and then it went through, the exact same version as before.

Now we have this issue once more, and of course we tried to submit the app before the christmas time window closes, but now it’s probably not gonna make it… So that kind of sucks.

But the main questions are:

  • Did anyone else experience this issue with a Meteor Cordova App (or any other app of course) before?
  • What could be a reason for this behaviour? We found hints to IPv6 - support being a requirement for app store success, but our providers don’t support it (yet) and it doesn’t really seem to be a hard requirement in any case.

What else could we do to prepare for this?

Thanks for all inspiration and ideas, thanks and have a great Christmas time

Daniel

PS: This is a screenshot from their environment, the text in the middle is from our app and means “Connecting” basically.