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With congressional polls and the greater vigilance of federal regulators on the horizon, Apple has abruptly reversed the course of its ban on parental control apps available in its app store.
As reported by The New York Times, Apple has quietly updated its guidelines regarding the App Store in order to reconsider its decision to ban certain parental control apps.
The battle between Apple Some application developers date back to last year, when the iPhone maker warned companies that they would have less access to the online store if they did not make any changes to their monitoring technologies.
The heart of the problem lies in the use of mobile device management (MDM) technologies in parental control apps that Apple has removed from the App Store, Apple said in a statement earlier this year.
These device management tools allow third parties to control and access the user's location, application usage, email accounts, camera permissions, and history of the device. navigation.
"We started exploring this use of MDM by non-enterprise developers in early 2017 and have updated our guidelines based on this work in mid-2017," the company said.
Apple acknowledged that the technology had legitimate uses in the context of companies seeking to monitor and manage their devices in order to control proprietary data and hardware, but the company said it was "d & # 39; A flagrant violation of the rules of the App Store – for a private company. Targeted application to install the MDM control on the device of a client. "
Last month, the developers of these parental monitoring tools came together to propose a solution. In a joint statement released by application developers, including OurPact, Screen Time, Kidslox, Qustodio, Boomerang, Safe Lagoon and FamilyOrbit, companies have simply stated, "Apple should release a public API giving developers the tools they need." access to the same features as the native version of Screen Time's uses. "
By providing access to its Screen Time application, Apple would eliminate the need for the type of controls that developers had put in place to circumvent Apple's restrictions.
"The API proposal presented here describes the features required to develop effective screen time management tools. It was developed by a group of leading parental control providers, "said the companies. "It allows developers to create apps that go beyond the iOS Screen Time feature, to address parent concerns about social media usage, child privacy, effective filtering of content on all browsers and applications, etc. This encourages developers to innovate and helps Apple confirm that "competition improves everything and gives the best applications to our customers." "
Apple has changed its guidelines to indicate that applications using MDM "must request mobile device management capability and may only be offered by commercial enterprises, such as professional organizations, educational institutions, or government agencies, and in some cases by companies using MDM on mobile devices. parental control purposes. MDM applications may not sell, use or disclose to third parties any data for any purpose whatsoever and must engage in it in their privacy policy. "
For the most part, it is only reversing the company's policy without giving access to Screen Time, as suggested by the consortium of companies.
"It's an infernal roller coaster," Dustin Dailey, Senior Product Manager at OurPact, told The New York Times. OurPact was the best parental control app from the App Store before it was withdrawn in February. The company estimated that Apple's move would have cost it about $ 3 million, a spokeswoman told the Times.
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