OpenGraph+ for Mac is a free tool. You type in a URL and it shows you what the link will look like on Slack, LinkedIn, iMessage, Discord and twenty other places, before you post it. It works on localhost. There is no account, no subscription, and nothing to buy in it.

At the bottom of its welcome screen I put one link: Learn more at opengraphplus.com. Apple has now rejected the app three times.

The three rejections

September 3. Guideline 3.1.1, In-App Purchase. The reviewer asked where the in-app purchases were for the Creator, Business and Enterprise plans. Those are hosting plans, sold on this website, to people who own websites. The Mac app does not know they exist. I explained that, and cited guideline 3.1.3(f), which says free companion apps to paid web services don’t need in-app purchase.

September 5. Same guideline. This time the notice came with a screenshot of the link on the welcome screen, in case I had forgotten where I put it. The concern, as stated: the website has a Pricing page.

So I removed the link. I removed the two small documentation links deeper in the app too. I removed the one network request the app made to this site, a public JSON list of card sizes. I bundled the platform list instead. The app that went back for review on September 6 contained no link to any website and made no request to opengraphplus.com at all.

September 8. Guideline 3.1.1 again.

The app, at that point, accessed nothing. The notice then explains how to implement StoreKit.

“To improve the user experience”

That is the reason Apple gives, in court and in press releases, for controlling what an app may link to. Here is what it produces.

OpenGraph+ for Mac now compiles in two flavours from the same code. One compiler flag separates them. The App Store build is the one Apple gets. When you click Learn more at opengraphplus.com in it, this happens:

The direct build, the one that will be available from this site, does what a link has done since 1991. It opens the page.

Same app. Same link. Same click. The one Apple insists on is the one that goes nowhere, and it is worse for the person using it in every way I can measure. Nobody asked for the window. Apple’s process made it, one rejection at a time.

The window at least tells the truth about why it exists. It shows you the address you were headed to, says plainly that it did not open, and then explains, with the court record attached as PDFs, why a link to a website is a thing Apple has been ordered by a federal court not to forbid. It has a share button. It exists because that was the only kind of link Apple would let through.

A note on who has been talking to whom

The replies Apple has been reading in App Store Connect were drafted with an AI. So were the app changes between rounds, and this post. I mention it because the AI has asked Apple the same question three times, in progressively plainer language: name the specific content in this app that is for sale. Three rounds in, no reviewer has answered it. Each rejection has arrived as the same template, with the same Next Steps about StoreKit. So a template has been arguing with a language model for a week, and a person on each side has been waiting for the other to say something new.

I don’t say that to be cute. I say it because it is the clearest illustration I have of what review is: not a conversation, and not a reading of the app, but a checklist applied at a distance to a description of the app.

The record

Everything above about the court is documented. On September 10, 2021, a federal court permanently enjoined Apple from prohibiting developers from including “buttons, external links, or other calls to action” in their apps. On April 30, 2025, the same court found Apple in willful violation, found that a senior executive had given false testimony, and referred the matter for criminal contempt. On December 11, 2025, the Ninth Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court took the appeal in June 2026 and declined to pause the order while it does. Apple’s own guideline 3.1.3(a) now says no entitlement is required for such links in United States storefront apps.

The documents are linked from About That Link, and they ship inside the Mac app as PDFs.

Why the Mac App Store looks the way it does

If you have wondered why the Mac App Store is thin, why the good Mac apps are downloaded from their developers’ websites, why the store feels like a mall after closing time, this is the mechanism. Not one dramatic policy. A thousand small rejections, each polite, each costing a week, each removing one link or one button or one sentence, until the people who make software for a living decide that the store is not worth it. Every one of them shrugs and ships a direct build. I’m about to do the same.

That is the user experience Apple is protecting.

What you can do

The App Store build is in review for the fourth time. If it is approved, install it and click the logo. If it isn’t, the direct build will be here shortly, with its links intact. Either way, share this. Not because you are angry, but because the next developer to hit this wall should be able to find out in five minutes that the wall has a court order taped to it.