You gotta love the guys at Apple.
This week four updates of my iOS apps got rejected by Apple because their “what’s new” descriptions mentioned “iOS 6”.
As in: * Fixed: some iOS 6 compatibility issues.

Here’s what happened: Last week, on Tuesday we submitted updates for all 10 of our iOS apps to Apple for approval. The main reason for the updates was to fix some new issues we found while testing our apps on the iOS 6 beta builds (released by Apple to developers exactly for this purpose).

On Friday, 5 of the apps got approved and were live in App Store (within 3 days, wow!). So far so good. But on Monday, we received notice that 4 of the other apps got rejected. The iTunes Connect Resolution Center said:

We found that your app contains references to a pre-release version of iOS/SDK in the metadata. Referencing a pre-GM version of the iOS/SDK is not in compliance with the iOS Developer Program License Agreement:

Section 2.3 – “…Apple may provide You with pre-release versions of the SDK that constitute Apple Confidential Information and are subject to the confidentiality obligations of this Agreement.”

It would be appropriate to remove any references to the pre-release version of iOS from your app metadata.

And indeed, my What’s New descriptions (of all 10 updates!) said:

Fixed:
– iOS 6: device rotation (Portrait/Landscape mode) didn’t work correctly
– iOS 6: Some toolbar buttons looked weird

Apparently, it is not allowed to refer to an upcoming iOS version,
even with the entire world already aware of its imminent arrival.

Anyway, we removed “iOS 6” from the What’s New of the 4 rejected apps and they went live in the App Store within a few hours… Why the first 5 apps got approved right away while having the same What’s New texts is beyond me. Oh well…

BTW: still waiting for the 10th app to go live…