I recently submitted an app to the App Store which was rejected as spam (Section 4.3). After speaking to an Apple rep, I learned the reason. The app is based on a propietary cross-platform engine which I have been developing for several years. We are not using any third-party software or 'app templates'. A couple of years ago my son and I collaborated on another project - I did the coding using the same engine, but he did the design and content creation. He published it under his own developer account. We worked together on the new app as well. They are both educational apps. The older one is used for learning algebra, and the new one for memorising language vocabulary. They do not look the same and have completely different content. But App's search engines have detected commonality in the code, because much of the underlying engine is the same, and because we are using different developer accounts, has rejected the latest as spam. I wondered if anyone else had encountered this kind of issue, and if there is a way round it? Surely many different developers use common engines (eg Unity) and their apps don't get detected as spam? If I decided to publish my engine as open source on Github, would every developer that used it get rejected as spam? There must be some way to avoid this problem.

I'm trying to search for keywords like NSError in a developer documentation page, and the result is always empty! I can't search for anything successfully. I'm using Google Chrome on Windows 10, which has always worked before.