©Truefit. All rights reserved.
©Truefit. All rights reserved.
At WWDC 2019, Apple announced a lot of cool, new tech in its ecosystem ranging from AR improvements to iPadOS. While much of the time was spent expanding the possibilities available to future apps, a couple of the announcements could affect iOS apps that are already in production, including sign-in changes, increasing privacy protection, and monetization.
Truefit clients can be confident that we are always on top of the latest guidelines and requirements. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us.
You can find the App Store Review Guideline changes here and the full guidelines here. All apps must meet these guidelines by September 3, 2019.
One of the major announcements was the introduction of “Sign In with Apple.” Similar to other 3rd party authentication systems, you will now be able to support your users signing in with their Apple ID. Apple is requiring ALL apps that already support 3rd party login to provide this as an option once it is released commercially later this year (expected to be in September). Thus if you support “Sign In With Facebook,” you now also need to add "Sign In with Apple."
While it is not clear if Apple will go through the App Store enforcing this rule as they have with others in the past, you can be sure that it will be enforced on any update submitted.
Privacy has been a big theme for the past year across software, and Apple is definitely doubling down on protecting user's data. To this end, they released quite a few new guidelines that can be grouped as follows:
Kid’s Data
If your app is sold in the kids category of the App Store, you cannot have any 3rd party ads or analytics in your app. You may not also transmit their data to any 3rd party.
Health Data
You must disclose the specific health data your app collects and the benefit the user will receive by providing you with that data. You may only do so if you are the entity that is providing the benefit and as that entity, you may not share the data with a 3rd party.
It is unclear how this will be applied to fitness trackers such as FitBit, but it is likely that Apple is intentionally driving data into HealthKit rather than allowing the current hodgepodge of the 3rd party APIs.
Anonymous Data
Apps must get consent to collect any data. This includes “anonymous data” often used for analytics.
If you collect usage analytics, you should verify that your Terms and Conditions cover that data collection.
Any iOS apps that wrap HTML5 apps (Cordova-based apps, mainly) may not access/transfer money in any way. Apple is requiring any code that handles money to be embedded in the app binary.
