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This week, Apple has updated its app store evaluation guidelines at WWDC 2019 – and many of these changes seem to directly address the type of controversy that has recently led us to wonder if Apple can trust Apple to start.
Most prominently, as The New York Times stresses that the company seems to be moving away from its position that screen time and parental control applications should not have access to the same powerful mobile device management (MDM) and VPN APIs as Big Businesses – what the company used earlier in the year to remove a bunch of these apps just as it introduced its own Screen Time feature.
"We do not know why we should trust big companies so they do not steal more customer data than these small businesses now banned," it was written last week. Apple seems to agree: according to Apple's changelog, "companies that use MDM for parental control purposes" are now part of the groups that can use this feature, alongside "professional organizations, educational institutions or government agencies ".
With respect to the VPN API, apps offering "parental control, content blocking and security" also benefit from a temporary exemption.
Mind you, it's not clear that the crackdown is really over, or that any of the previously banned apps – which have recently regrouped to ask Apple to publicly release a new parental control API dedicated to them – will find it in the list. the shop. A new API would certainly have been a more logical solution if Apple really thought that MDM was as dangerous as it told the world in April. These changes give the impression that Apple's fears are exaggerated or that it is willing to compromise on this conviction to satisfy these developers.
However, there is one essential protection: the two new rules still allow Apple to choose winners and losers. MDM is allowed "in limited cases", while parental control applications may use a VPN if they come from "approved providers".
Other changes from the headlines in the new Apple App Store Review guidelines include that "apps for kids can not include third-party advertising and badytics" after The Wall Street JournalJoanna Stern discovered that a Curious George app was pbading on the name, age, and choice of her son's books to Facebook, as well as a pair of new rules requiring apps to obtain explicit consent any form of data collection, even anonymous or extracted from a file. public database, after The Washington Post Geoffrey Fowler explained how hidden application trackers extracted his data overnight.
Yesterday, we also explained how Apple is tightening its rules on business app certificates – another scandal that allows app developers to completely bypbad the App Store to create a illegal world of illicit applications – and how Apple uses its property on the App Store to compel iOS developers adopt its new single sign-on feature.
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