To put it simply: pray to the whatever spiritual deity you believe in (or other such thing) on app review and hope that Apple doesn't try anything when reviewing your app. The best method is always to make sure that adult content can never end up before a reviewers eyes, so unless you have an unusually thorough reviewer who goes out of their way to look for it, they won't complain. Apples role as a moral guardian on NSFW content is one of the bigger driving factors as to why NSFW gets treated as second class, even though NSFW content has been estimated to be a very large amount of all internet traffic.

Tumblr is just one example. Discord had to restrict all NSFW channels in their app for iOS users because their randomly assigned App Store reviewer managed to get their account into an NSFW channel and found the expected.

Reddit just never had to deal with this issue because they didn't even have an iPhone app for years (their current app is a highly modified version of an older app, Alien Blue, but AB was pulled from the App Store when Reddit bought it) or they deal with it quietly so you don't hear about it. Not all companies who get shafted on the NSFW rule speak up about it, but those that have... all have repeatedly commented on the fact that the process is basically completely opaque and you need to basically pray that Apple doesn't decide to pull your current version either.

Tumblr picked the easy way out (ban all NSFW in general) because they were about to be sold to Verizon and Yahoo didn't want to bother trying to find a way to appease to apple at the last minute.

Ah that makes sense. Yes Reddit is pretty good at not showing you NSFW unless you actually go and look for it. But when you do it takes you all the way down the rabbit hole (figuratively!! - I hope), this is why I found it a bit surprising, it's not just some lingerie pics or anything.

In a way though, that means Safari should be banned too. And the camera app, I mean point it down in the right state of undress... ;)

More techbros use Reddit than Tumblr so Reddit got better treatment from the tech corp than Tumblr.

too big to ban