The rejection email arrived on an ordinary afternoon, and our first reaction wasn’t worry. It was confusion.
We’d submitted a routine update to Nexcue — a renamed listing, a new “upcoming season” feature, nothing dramatic. App Review came back with guideline 4.1(a), “Design – Copycats.” The notice said our metadata contained content that resembled series like Euphoria and The Boys, and that it leveraged the popularity of a well-known actor, without authorization.
We read it twice. We don’t show those shows in our screenshots. The screenshots hadn’t even changed from the previous, already-approved version. And the celebrity they named wasn’t in our listing at all — the actor we do show is someone else entirely. For a few minutes it felt like the review had landed on the wrong app.
It hadn’t. We were just looking in the wrong place.
”Metadata” means more than you think
When you read “metadata” you picture the text fields: title, subtitle, description, keywords. But App Review uses the word more broadly than developers do. It includes your screenshots, your preview video — and, in practice, what a reviewer sees while actually using the app.
Nexcue helps people remember the shows they’re watching, so naturally it displays show artwork and cast information. A reviewer testing the update would have browsed to real series, seen real posters, and opened pages with real actors’ photos. That was the “content that resembles Euphoria and The Boys.” The celebrity they named may have been a misunderstanding, or just shorthand — we can’t really know, and it doesn’t ultimately matter. Whether or not that detail was a slip, the real objection was clear: recognizable, copyrighted material appearing without rights.
Once we understood that, the rejection stopped being mysterious and started being uncomfortable. Because it pointed at something we’d quietly taken for granted.
Where the artwork actually comes from
Like a lot of apps in this space, Nexcue pulls show data from The Movie Database (TMDB) — titles, seasons, posters, cast. TMDB has a clean API and generous terms, and it’s the obvious starting point.
But here’s the thing we hadn’t sat with properly.
TMDB gives you access to the data. It doesn’t own the artwork.
The posters belong to the studios and distributors who made them. TMDB is a catalog, not a rights holder. So “we get it from TMDB” answers where the file came from, not whether we’re allowed to put it on a billboard.
Inside an app, displaying that artwork to help a user identify their own shows sits in a grey area that a great many apps live in. But App Store screenshots are marketing. Apple holds marketing assets to a stricter standard, and a store page full of recognizable posters and faces can read, to a reviewer, as implying an endorsement that doesn’t exist. That’s the heart of 4.1(a): don’t trade on someone else’s work or fame.
We hadn’t been trying to.
But intent isn’t the test.
The “but everyone does it” trap
Our first instinct was the one everyone has: open the App Store, search for any TV or movie app, and notice that almost all of them use poster art in their screenshots. If they can, why can’t we?
It’s a real observation, and it’s worth knowing. But it’s a weak argument to make to App Review, because Apple’s stated position is explicit: the existence of other apps that may be in violation isn’t precedent for yours. Lead with “but they do it too” and you’ll get a polite, copy-pasted version of exactly that. Enforcement here is also genuinely inconsistent — the same assets that passed last time can be flagged this time, often by a different reviewer. Consistency is not something you can count on.
So “everyone does it” is useful for calibrating how normal your situation is. It is not a defense.
The part that actually stings
Here’s the honest tension, and it’s why this wasn’t a five-minute fix: the posters make the app recognizable. People scan a store page and recognize the shows they love. Strip the artwork out and the page feels, on first glance, less appealing — less obviously for them.
That’s a real trade-off, and we sat with it rather than pretending it away. What helped was separating two things we’d been treating as one:
The in-app experience — where the artwork helps a user organize the shows they chose to track — is a different context from the store page, which is pure marketing. We can keep the app rich while making the marketing lean on what’s unambiguously ours: our own interface, the “what’s next” screen, the quiet season-return notification that’s actually our differentiator. A store page doesn’t need a wall of posters to communicate “this remembers your shows.” It needs to show the thing we built.
We’re also doing the boring-but-right things: making our use of TMDB properly attributed, stating clearly that we claim no affiliation with any show or person, and — because we were genuinely unsure where the line sits — treating the rights question as something to get real advice on rather than guess at.
As of writing, this is still in motion. We’ve responded to the review and we’re waiting. We don’t have a tidy ending to give you yet, which feels like the right note for a first time writing about it: this is what building in public actually looks like.
What we’d tell another small studio
If you’re showing third-party artwork anywhere near your App Store listing, assume the screenshots are the riskiest place, not the app itself. “We get it from an API” is not the same as “we have the rights.” And the fact that your competitors do the same thing will not save you — it’ll just tell you you’re in normal company while you fix it.
Mostly, though, the lesson was quieter than the rejection made it feel. We’d borrowed something without quite registering that we’d borrowed it. Getting told no was annoying in the moment and, in hindsight, fair.
The work now is to make the thing we show people genuinely ours — to lean on what we actually built rather than on borrowed recognition. That’s slower than dropping in a poster everyone already knows, and on a store page it’s the harder path. But it’s also, when we started Studio81, sort of the whole point: build things on purpose, create your own value, and show people the real thing instead of someone else’s.
— Studio81