Feeding Store Review Guidelines as a PDF to the Agent to Build a Per-App Pre-Release Checklist

Using Antigravity v2.1.4's PDF attachment, this walks through reading the App Store and Play review guidelines into the agent as context and turning them into a pre-release checklist tied to your app's actual features.

Antigravity²⁵³ PDF² App Store⁵ Google Play² Release

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The rejection notice usually arrived a few days after I had already tapped submit. Reading the reason, it was always a clause that genuinely existed somewhere in the guidelines — I had simply missed it. But the official guidelines are long, and re-reading the whole thing on every update is not realistic. Running several wallpaper and relaxation apps in parallel, this "re-reading tax" had quietly become a drag on shipping updates.

Antigravity v2.1.4 lets you attach a PDF to Gemini models, and that change let me set part of this burden down. This article lays out, in the shape I actually use it, how to read a review-guideline PDF into the agent as context and turn it into checks tied to your own app.

Why PDF attachment helps release work

You could always paste guideline text and have the agent read it. The trouble is that both Apple's App Review Guidelines and Google Play's policies are full of sections and tables, and pasting them as plain text breaks that structure. Once the link between clause numbers and their text is lost, the agent's answers tend to feel plausible but untraceable.

In v2.1.4 you can load a PDF by drag-and-drop or from the Add Context menu. Because the original section structure is preserved, it becomes much easier to get a grounded answer to a clause-level question like "which feature does 3.1.1 relate to."

How you pass it	Good for	Watch out for
Pasted text	Checking just one or two clauses	Tables and hierarchy break
PDF attachment (drag-and-drop)	Holding the whole guideline in context	Accuracy drops in the back half of long files
Add Context menu	Referencing several files side by side	Don't mix in unrelated files

Steps: from guidelines to an app-specific checklist

Summarizing the guidelines wholesale only yields generalities. The value shows up when you cross-reference your app's features against the clauses. I work in this order.

First, prepare a short note listing the target app's features. For a wallpaper app that might be at the granularity of: rewarded ads, subscription, saving images, whether there is user-generated content. Then attach the review-guideline PDF and hand it to the agent together with that feature note.

The key is to specify the output format right in the prompt.

The attached PDF is the App Store review guidelines.
Below is the feature list for my app.
 
- Rewarded ads (AdMob)
- Monthly auto-renewing subscription
- Saving wallpaper images to the camera roll
- No user-generated content
 
For each feature, list the guideline clauses most likely to apply,
in three columns: "clause number / gist / what I should verify in my app".
Always cite the clause number from the PDF text; if you are guessing, say so.
Don't force in clauses that are only weakly relevant.

Binding it to "always cite the clause number from the PDF text" cuts down on untraceable answers. Adding "if you are guessing, say so" nudges the agent away from false certainty.

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WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✦A concrete flow for using v2.1.4 PDF attachment to read review guidelines as context and map them to per-feature checks

✦Prompt design that keeps accuracy on long PDFs by chunking, requiring clause citations, and forcing structured output

✦A verification step so you never take the AI's reading at face value, plus a checklist you can reuse across apps

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Keeping accuracy on long PDFs

The App Review Guidelines are long, and passing the whole PDF at once can leave the later clauses thinly handled. The workaround I use is a two-pass approach split by chapter.

First, extract only the table of contents (chapter titles and numbers) from the attached PDF.
Pick just 3-5 chapters likely related to my feature list, and return those chapter numbers.

I then narrow to the returned chapter numbers and ask again: "build the checks using only the range of these chapters." With a tighter scope, the clause citations get more accurate. When you span platforms, handle Apple and Google in separate sessions to avoid mixing up clause numbers.

Pitfall	Symptom	Fix
PDF too long	Later clauses go unsummarized	Narrow chapters via the TOC first
Vague clause numbers	Numbers don't exist / are off	Require citation and cross-check by hand
Two platforms mixed	Apple and Google numbers blend	Split the sessions

Keeping the output reusable

A checklist is not a one-and-done artifact. Every time you update the app, you want to re-verify only the features that changed. I receive the output as Markdown checkboxes keyed by feature name and keep it in the repository.

## Rewarded ads (AdMob)
- [ ] 3.1.1 Not forcing ads as a substitute for in-app purchase
- [ ] 1.4.x Ads not inappropriate for the age rating
 
## Monthly subscription
- [ ] 3.1.2 Auto-renewal terms and price clearly disclosed
- [ ] Restore flow actually works

On the next update, I re-attach this same Markdown and ask: "this time I only changed the subscription price display — mark the items likely affected." Because I can review just the diff, there is no need to re-read everything from scratch each time. Tracking state is as simple as running a plain count over the file in the repo.

import re, sys
 
text = open(sys.argv[1], encoding="utf-8").read()
done = len(re.findall(r"- \[x\]", text))
todo = len(re.findall(r"- \[ \]", text))
total = done + todo
print(f"Done {done}/{total} (remaining {todo})")

Never take the AI's reading at face value

This may contradict everything above, but I do not treat the agent's clause interpretation as the final authority. Review guidelines get updated, and if the PDF is stale, both the numbers and the wording drift. I treat the agent's role as "catching clauses I likely overlooked, ahead of time" — not as judging pass or fail.

In practice, I open each clause number the agent raised in the latest official version, read the text with my own eyes, and only then tick the box. It sounds like extra work, but compared with re-reading the entire document top to bottom every time, it finishes far faster because the places to check are already narrowed down.

If pre-release anxiety shifts from a vague "did I miss something" to a concrete "I just need to confirm these five items," tapping submit gets a good deal lighter. I hope this helps anyone juggling several apps with their own update work.

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