What's actually free to change on a live App Store listing

Deep Cut Atlas’s first App Store submission had just been accepted, and I had Spanish and Portuguese listings ready to go: translated copy, bilingual review done, localized screenshots already captured. All of it blocked for days, because App Store Connect won’t let you add a new language while an app is mid-review. The moment the review cleared, I figured this was a quick paste-in job.

The banner nobody reads

It wasn’t quite that simple. The App Information page in App Store Connect carries a banner that’s easy to skim past: changing the App Name, category, or privacy policy requires creating a new app version, but everything else on that page - subtitle, description, keywords, promotional text, screenshots - applies to the live app immediately.

I’d never run into that distinction before, because my only prior App Store experience was a first submission, where the whole app is new anyway and every field is part of the same review.

The wording I’d already fixed once

Before pasting anything in, I caught a second problem. Both the Spanish and Portuguese subtitle drafts said “Apple Music” by name. That’s the exact trademark pattern that got the English listing rejected under guideline 5.2.5 a few days earlier.

Easy thing to miss: the English subtitle had already been fixed to drop that wording, but the translated drafts were written before that fix and never got revisited. A correction applied to the source language doesn’t propagate itself to work that was branched off earlier, which is a shape I keep running into in different clothes.

The fix

Created a new version (1.0.1) purely to unlock the App Name field for the new locales, saved everything else immediately since it didn’t need the version bump at all, and rewrote both subtitles to describe what the app does instead of naming the service.

One extra snag: I tried using a plain support email address as the Support URL, since there’s no dedicated support page yet, and App Store Connect rejected it outright. That field wants an actual http/https URL, so the app’s existing marketing page ended up doing double duty.

The part that surprised me

Creating that new version isn’t free, even though nothing in the app itself changed. Apple’s own docs are clear that a version can’t go through App Review without an attached build. So at some point I still have to archive, upload, and submit a build with identical source code, just to make the new version - and the App Name field riding on it - actually go live.

“No code changes” turned out to mean the Swift doesn’t change. Not that the review cycle goes away.