Apple recently sent some shock waves through the development and tech-loving small business community with its updated App Store Guidelines that govern the review and acceptance process of apps submitted to their app store. Of specific concern is Section 4.2.6 which states “”Apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service will be rejected.”
It is hard to define what constitutes an “app generation service” and this grey area is open to interpretation.
At one end of the interpretation spectrum is the assumption that Apple is simply focusing on the thousands of close or spam apps, think 1000’s of “Flappy Bird” or identical slot machine apps. This interpretation has very little impact for responsible development agencies and real clients who have developed apps with specific functionality and a unique value proposition to the user and one would hope and expect that they would be unaffected.
However, at the other end of the interpretation spectrum is the fear that Apple will reject any new, and unpublish any existing, apps which have been developed in part or wholly using any of the vast number of app generation tools that exist. If this line was strictly enforced and Apple takes this route it will have a significant impact on the number of apps listed in their app store, but more seriously, it could impact thousands of app development agencies, app developers and app owners as their investment (often expensive) is pulled out of the store by the distributor.
Bizzness Apps alone claims over 500 000 published apps, mostly by small businesses or small reseller agencies on behalf of their clients. If these are all unpublished then each one of those agencies, their clients and those small businesses who self published will be detrimentally affected. And, this is just one such platform. What about Good Barber, Telerik, Ionic, Shoutem, Swiftic and on and on and on. Which of these will be deemed “app generation services” that fall foul of Apple’s new guideline? Some are more developer friendly, while some are low-code and some even no-code publishing platforms, and there is no clairty at this stage where Apple will draw the line or what they are targeting. So the industry waits with anticipation.
Apple has in the region of 2.5 million apps in their store. Swiftic, alone, claims to power more than 1 million apps, Bizzness Apps, as previously mentioned, claims to power over 500 000….so its clearly apparent that the impact of this clause could be seismic and could change the app development industry as the world knows it.
We are watching with keen interest and will report as soon as any new info is known.
Until then…..
