Rejected for being a duplicate of apps I have never seen — how do you actually get out of the spam guideline?

The mechanism that actually moves these is the note to the reviewer, and almost nobody uses it properly.

It is a free-text field attached to the build. Most people leave it empty or put a test login in it. What works is treating it as a short argument addressed to a person who has ninety seconds and no context:

• One sentence on what the app does
• Two or three specific things it does that the apps they are comparing it to do not — named features, not adjectives
• If you have a real user base, a number
• If something looks generic and is not, say why

The reason this works is structural: the reviewer is comparing your binary against a mental model of a class of apps. The note is the only place you get to say "here is why I am not that class", and if you leave it empty you have declined to make the argument.

Two more things that help:

Change something real between submissions. Resubmitting the same binary with new screenshots reads as an appeal, and appeals are handled by the same standard that rejected you.

Use the formal appeal route if you genuinely believe it is wrong, rather than resubmitting repeatedly. That goes to a different process and it is where you can actually argue the decision. Resubmit loops do not escalate on their own — they just accumulate.

This guideline is a bucket, not a diagnosis, and that is why the reply repeated itself — the reviewer often cannot tell you more because the rejection is a category rather than a finding.

What actually lands in it, in rough order of frequency:

Template or generator output. Apps built from a purchasable template are the thing the rule was written for, and they are detected by structure, not by looks. If any part of the project came from a template, that is the likely trigger even if you rewrote most of it.

Thin wrappers. An app whose function is mostly a website in a shell, or a single API call with a screen around it. "Small utility" is fine; "one screen calling one endpoint" often is not.

Category saturation with no differentiator you have stated. Not that others exist, but that nothing in your listing or your app says what is different. Reviewers are not going to work it out.

Account history. If the same account has published several similar small apps, the bar rises sharply. This is real and it is the one people never suspect.

So the question to answer honestly before resubmitting is which of those four you are. Rewriting the description and screenshots addresses only the third, which is why it changed nothing — if you are in the first, second or fourth bucket, no amount of listing work will move it.