Category: Apple Developer News

This International Women’s Month, we’re celebrating women founders, creators, developers, and designers. Read on to learn more about their journeys and the stories behind their apps and games.

Behind the Design: Rebel Girls

The Rebel Girls app uses immersive audio experiences, gorgeous art, and clever interactive elements to spotlight its historic heroines. “We’re creating an omnichannel for girls,” says Jes Wolfe, CEO of Rebel Girls. “The app takes the best of our books, podcasts, and audio stories and puts them into a flagship destination.”

Behind the Design: Rebel Girls

Find out how the groundbreaking book became an ADA-winning app.

Download Rebel Girls from the App Store

Behind the Design: Wylde Flowers

This charming Apple Design Award-winning game is a cross-pollination of farming simulation, eerie mystery, optional love story, and exploration of tolerance and understanding. Also, you’re a witch who sometimes turns into a cat. “The Wylde Flowers experience is a bit different for everybody,” says Amanda Schofield, cofounder, creative director, and managing director of indie developer Studio Drydock. “It’s all about self-expression and self-exploration.”

Behind the Design: Wylde Flowers

Discover how Studio Drydock created this charming Apple Design Award-winning game.

Download Wylde Flowers from Apple Arcade

Developer Spotlight: Rootd

When she started having panic attacks as a university student, Ania Wysocka (pictured above) wanted “to look for an app that could explain what was happening to me,” she says. But when the hypnosis and therapy apps she downloaded didn’t have what she was seeking, she decided to create Rootd to demystify panic attacks and bring on-the-spot relief.

Developer Spotlight: Rootd

Talk about an impressive résumé.

Download Rootd from the App Store

Behind the Design: Overboard!

In the evocative murder mystery game Overboard!, you play not as the detective but the murderer most foul — Veronica Villensey, a fading 1930s starlet who’s tossed her husband off a cruise ship. To bring the story to life, artist and designer Anastasia Wyatt trawled into the rich potential of the game’s vintage setting, pulling designs from 1930s fashion, magazines, and even sewing pattern books.

Behind the Design: Overboard!

How Inkle built an upside-down whodunit in just 100 days.

Download Overboard! from the App Store

Behind the Design: Pok Pok Playroom

When the husband-and-wife team of Esther Huybreghts and Mathijs Demaeght first began dreaming up Pok Pok Playroom, they made a solemn vow: parents shouldn’t need to mute the app in a restaurant. “We didn’t want media and jingles and jangles that get stuck in your head,” Huybreghts laughs. “We wanted a quieter experience.”

Behind the Design: Pok Pok Playroom

Pok Pok Playroom is a quiet feast for little senses. There are switches to flip, gears to grind, blobs to plop together, and bells to ring — and those are just a handful of the animations designed to make the app feel like a tactile, handmade toy.

Download Pok Pok Playroom from the App Store

Developer Spotlight: Ground News

In 2017, Harleen Kaur launched Ground News, a news aggregator that helps you see how media outlets across the political spectrum are covering—or ignoring—a topic. Not only does it let you read coverage from thousands of publications worldwide, it also shows the political bent of an article or outlet (which is ranked by a third-party service and Ground News users themselves).

Developer Spotlight: Ground News

Talk about an impressive résumé.

Download Ground News from the App Store

Developer Spotlight: Prêt-à-Template

When Prêt-à-Template founder and CEO Roberta Weiand launched her app in 2014, it quickly became a darling among fashion designers around the world. With its library of templates, textures, and patterns, the app lets anyone sketch their dream outfit.

Developer Spotlight: Prêt-à-Template

Download Prêt-à-Template from the App Store

Developer Spotlight: The Dyrt

Sarah Smith, an avid camper and cofounder of The Dyrt, was frustrated by how hard it was to find details on a campsite before you booked. She wanted to know that, say, site 2 was next to a busy road, while site 7 was along a river. She wondered why nobody seemed to be solving the problem. Then she had a thought that changed everything: “Why can’t I do it?”

Developer Spotlight: The Dyrt

Download The Dyrt from the App Store

Read more

Discover more apps founded by women

App Analytics in App Store Connect is a helpful tool with a breadth of features to help you understand and improve how your app is performing on the App Store. With metrics related to acquisition, usage, and monetization strategy, App Analytics enables you to monitor results in each stage of the customer lifecycle, from awareness to conversion and on to retention. Starting today, you can put your app’s performance into context using peer group benchmarks, which compare your app’s performance to that of similar apps on the App Store. Now you’ll have even more insights to help you identify growth opportunities.

Peer group benchmarks provide powerful new insights across the customer journey, so you can better understand what works well for your app and find opportunities for improvement. Apps are placed into groups based on their App Store category, business model, and download volume to ensure relevant comparisons. Using industry-leading differential privacy techniques, peer group benchmarks provide relevant and actionable insights — all while keeping the performance of individual apps private.

Review your new benchmark data, then leverage other tools in App Store Connect to improve conversion rates, proceeds, crash rates, and user retention. You can test different elements of your product page to find out which resonate with people most, create additional product page versions to highlight specific features or content, get feedback on beta versions of your app, offer in‑app events to encourage engagement, and so much more.

Learn how to view benchmark data

Learn how to take action on insights from benchmarks

Explore the latest developer videos and learn about Metal, SharePlay, enterprise apps and more.

What’s new for enterprise developers

Discover how you can build compelling apps for your business on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS. We’ll take you through a curated overview of the latest updates to Apple platforms and show you how to transform workflows, inform business decisions, and boost employee productivity.

What’s new for enterprise developers

Discover how you can build compelling apps for your business on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS. We’ll take you through a curated overview of the latest updates to Apple platforms and explore relevant features that you can use to create engaging enterprise apps to transform workflows, inform…

Discover Metal Performance HUD

Get to know the new Metal Performance heads-up display panel built to help you analyze graphics performance in real time. Metal Performance HUD displays key graphics statistics so you can monitor, log, and identify tough-to-spot performance problems.

Discover Metal Performance HUD

Get to know the new heads-up display panel built to help you analyze graphics performance in real time. Metal Performance HUD displays key graphics statistics so you can monitor, log, and identify tough-to-spot performance problems.

Add SharePlay to your multiplayer game with Game Center

Learn how to let your players jump into games with friends they’re on FaceTime calls with, using SharePlay. We’ll show you how easy it is to turn on SharePlay support if you are already using the Game Center multiplayer UI. And if you’ve built a custom interface, we’ll give you the few lines of code you need to support SharePlay.

Add SharePlay to your multiplayer game with Game Center

Learn how to let your players jump into games with friends they’re on FaceTime calls with, using SharePlay. We’ll show you how easy it is to turn on SharePlay support if you are already using the Game Center multiplayer UI. And if you’ve built a custom interface, we’ll give you the few lines of…

Migrate custom intents to App Intents

Learn how you can easily convert your existing custom intents to App Intents. We’ll take you through the conversion of your intents to Swift and discuss how you can improve discoverability of your app features when you create App Shortcuts.

Migrate custom intents to App Intents

Learn how you can easily convert your existing custom intents to App Intents. We’ll take you through the conversion of your intents to Swift and discuss how you can improve discoverability of your app features when you create App Shortcuts. To learn more about App Intents, watch “Implement App…

Implement Apple Pay and order management

Explore Apple Pay, an easy and secure way for people to make payments in your iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS apps and on the web. We’ll take you through the entire Apple Pay implementation workflow – including how you can signal support for Apple Pay, request payment and handling updates, and add order details at the end of a payment flow to help people track their purchases.

Implement Apple Pay and order management

Apple Pay provides an easy and secure way for people to make payments in your iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS apps as well as on the web. We’ll take you through the entire Apple Pay implementation workflow – including how you can signal support for Apple Pay, request payment and handling updates, and…

The App Store’s commerce and payments system was built to empower you to conveniently set up and sell your products and services at a global scale with 44 currencies across 175 Storefronts. Periodically, we update prices on the App Store in certain regions based on changes in taxes and foreign exchange rates. This is done using publicly available exchange rate information from financial data providers to help ensure prices for apps and in‑app purchases stay equalized across all storefronts.

On February 13, 2023, prices of apps and in-app purchases (excluding auto-renewable subscriptions) on the App Store will increase in Colombia, Egypt, Hungary, Nigeria, Norway, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. Prices in Uzbekistan will decrease to reflect a reduction of the value-added tax rate from 15% to 12%. Your proceeds will be adjusted accordingly and will be calculated based on the tax-exclusive price.

While prices on the App Store in Ireland, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Zimbabwe won’t change, your proceeds will be adjusted to reflect the following tax changes:

• Ireland: Reduction of value-added tax rate on electronic newspapers and periodicals from 9% to 0%
• Luxembourg: Reduction of value-added tax rate from 17% to 16%
• Singapore: Increase of goods and services tax rate from 7% to 8%
• Zimbabwe: Increase of value-added tax rate from 14.5% to 15%

Additionally, by the end of January proceeds will increase for local developers selling in Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, Tajikistan, Thailand, and Uzbekistan.

Apple will estimate and remove taxes based on the tax category information you have provided before calculating commission. Exhibit B of the Paid Applications Agreement will be updated to reflect this change.

Once these changes go into effect, the Pricing and Availability section of My Apps will be updated. As always, you can change the price of your apps and in-app purchases (including auto-renewable subscriptions) at any time in App Store Connect. If you offer subscriptions, you can choose to preserve prices for existing subscribers.

And as previously announced, in spring 2023, upgraded pricing capabilities for apps and in-app purchases will provide you 700 additional price points and more flexibility to set prices per storefront, so you can manage foreign exchange rate changes independent of globally equalized prices.

View the updated price tier charts.

December 20, 2022

Thank you to everyone who joined us during three great weeks of Ask Apple in October, November, and December. Q&As remain available in Slack for Ask Apple participants to review as needed.

If you haven’t already told us about your experience in Q&As, we’d love to get your feedback in our short survey. It only takes a few minutes to complete and your responses will be anonymous.

We’re excited to connect with you again soon.

Take the survey

Starting January 18, 2023, the App Store receipt signing certificate will use a new WWDR intermediate certificate. The existing intermediate certificate expires on February 7, 2023. In most cases, this certificate change won’t require changes to apps. However, we recommend reviewing how you verify the sale of your apps and in-app purchases from the App Store to make sure your apps aren’t impacted.

If you verify App Store transactions using the AppTransaction and Transaction APIs, or the verifyReceipt web service endpoint, no action is required.

If you validate App Store receipts on device using the App Store receipt signing certificate, make sure you haven’t hardcoded the intermediate certificate and verify that the chain of trust for the container’s signature matches the Apple Inc. Root Certificate.

Additional details on App Store receipt validation:

Validating receipts with the App Store

Choosing a receipt validation technique

When it comes to designing creative interactions, the Procreate team knows how to get the job done.

The illustration app kicked off in 2011 with touch-based controls — “just five fingers of input,” says CEO James Cuda — and won a rare pair of Apple Design Awards over the next decade for their innovative approaches to digital drawing, sketching, and painting.

While finger painting remains a core part of the app, Apple Pencil has become a significant part of Procreate’s story. Apple Pencil gives artists customization and control of their line width and opacity, stroke style, and quick-access controls. And with the introduction of Apple Pencil hover, the Procreate team is investing even more heavily in the stylus. “It’s truly made a profound impact in our design phase,” says Cuda.

As with pretty much any other digital or analog drawing tool, Apple Pencil operates on the X and Y axes of a canvas, requiring direct input from the stylus nib to draw a line or select a tool. The second-generation Apple Pencil also adds support for direct input along the side of the stylus — which gives developers an option to add shortcuts within their apps. Now, Apple Pencil hover is bringing tool and previewing shortcuts into an entirely new dimension. (The Z-axis, specifically.)

“[It’s] a whole new layer of interaction,” says Cuda. “Everything springs to life as your Apple Pencil comes near.”

Apple Pencil hover activates when the nib is up to 12 mm above the display on iPad Pro with the M2 chip. Developers can customize what the feature does within their app, including offering tool variations, menu selection, and even previewing lines themselves — so artists can draw, sketch, and color with even greater control. “The ability to not make a commitment or damage the artwork is transformative,” Cuda says.

And the feature’s functionality is only half the fun. “It makes everything feel so playful,” says Claire d’Este, Procreate’s chief product officer. “I find myself rolling up and down menus just to see it responding. There’s something so nice about everything lighting up as I’m thinking about what to do next.”

The ability to not make a commitment or damage the artwork is transformative.

James Cuda, Procreate CEO

The Procreate team has hidden these sorts of playful moments throughout the entire app. In the gallery view, hovering over thumbnails expands the image or previews animations. Tools like the color picker or menu buttons react as you move across them. And then, of course, there’s the canvas.

‘Your mind starts racing’

“There are two phases with something like this,” says Procreate chief technology officer Lloyd Bottomley. “The first is the initial, ‘Wow, this is cool.’ But then your mind starts racing because you’re trying to think of all the things you could do with it.”

With so many possibilities open to them, the Procreate team had to approach each idea with care and scrutiny to ensure they were aiding and improving design and creation workflows rather than hindering them. “We’re obsessed with keeping people focused on that point of interaction,” Bottomley says.

One area that proved surprisingly challenging: the brush cursor. “Honestly, we thought we’d have just one design through the entire brush library,” says Cuda. “The problem was there’s not one singular representation of that hover mark, because our brushes can do anything — you can have brushes inside brushes; you can have brushes that move across each other. To represent all that in a hover state was really challenging.”

We’re obsessed with keeping people focused on that point of interaction.

Lloyd Bottomley, Procreate chief technology officer

After a few weeks of back and forth, the team landed on a solution: customizable cursors that change with different brushes. “We needed to move away from that idea of ‘one thing to rule them all’ to a series of settings that could get us there,” says Cuda. “Now, all the brush-makers out there can customize what their hover state will look like.”

A second target was the app’s ColorDrop feature, which instantly fills a section of your artwork when you drag and drop a color on it, paint-by-numbers style. Using Apple Pencil hover, people can preview of what the artwork will look like before committing to a color, speeding up the process dramatically. “If you’re doing inking — comic book art, for instance — it’s huge,” says d’Este.

If you’re doing inking — comic book art, for instance — it’s huge.

Claire d’Este, Procreate chief product officer

It’s also a timely example of how a small change can make a massive improvement in an artistic workflow. “Those kinds of interactions take a surprising amount of time,” says Bottomley. “Even moving your arm across the screen takes time. Now you barely have to move.”

The saga of the sliders

While the Procreate team delighted in improving interactions for brush cursors and ColorDrop, they had a much bigger problem they hoped Apple Pencil hover would solve: a little piece of UI that had been bothering the team since the app’s very first days.

“Our goal is to put absolute focus on the artist’s content,” says Cuda. Procreate’s interface has long championed minimalistic tool windows and intuitive gestures like tap-to-undo to keep the canvas clear for the work. But they hit a proverbial artistic wall when trying to build UI for repetitive interactions like adjusting brush size or opacity.

Iterations came and went; the pair tried variations on pinching and zooming and tapping and holding, but nothing felt properly connected to the rest of the Procreate experience. “We ditched it all,” says Bottomley, “and went with that very conventional set of sliders you see on the left hand side of the screen.”

The sliders were functional. They were intuitive enough. But whenever the team thought about features they really liked about the app, the sliders were conspicuously absent — until Apple Pencil hover. “Once hover was announced, we realized we could work with Multi-Touch like we couldn’t before,” says Cuda.

With Apple Pencil hover, could they at last kill the sidebar? “We developed a gesture we thought would be just so ubiquitous and approachable,” says Cuda. “The idea was you would use two fingers to pinch and zoom while you’ve got hover up, so you could clearly see where your brush is and how it changes in size before you mark the screen. We were convinced it would be the way of the future.”

And then they began testing.

“We realized we were wrong as soon as we put it in practice,” says Cuda. The gesture worked brilliantly when iPad was sitting on a table or against a stand — a common-enough use case — but anyone using the tablet on a couch had a different experience. “You’re clutching the device with two hands,” he says. “And as soon as you pinch and hover, the device is no longer, uh, in your clutches.”

We had to put our egos aside and go, ‘OK, maybe we were wrong.’

James Cuda, Procreate CEO

The challenge was enough to send the team back to the drawing board. “The gesture is useful; it’s just not the singular interface methodology were hoping to create,” says Cuda. “We had to put our egos aside and go, ‘OK, maybe we were wrong.’ And we had to think about what was best for the customer.”

For customers holding the device, it meant the return of the sliders. “We’re keeping them for mobile drawing,” Cuda says. “On a desk or stand, when you’ve got both hands free, the sidebar goes away and we get exactly what we wanted. So it was a wild ride for a couple of weeks making those calls.”

‘It’s hard to go back’

People using iPad Pro with the M2 chip and the second-generation Apple Pencil, can explore Procreate’s Apple Pencil hover features now. But Cuda and the team are focused strongly on the future, regarding hover as an important new tool in the shed — enough so that Cuda says it already “solves a bunch of things” in regards to upcoming projects.

“It doesn’t feel like we’re tapping into a technology but creating a natural extension of what you could already do,” d’Este says. “Once you’ve experienced this, it’s hard to go back.”

Read Behind the Design with Procreate

Download Procreate from the App Store

Join us for another exciting week of Ask Apple, where you can connect directly with Apple experts to get your latest technical and design questions answered — or just hang out and learn from the conversation. Ask about using the latest frameworks, improving your app’s UI design, developing with beta OS software and tools, and so much more.

Online one-on-one consultations and group Q&As will run December 12 to 16, with activities in multiple languages and time zones. Registration is open now to current members of the Apple Developer Program and Apple Developer Enterprise Program.

Learn more

Developers will also gain new flexibility to manage pricing globally

Apple today announced the most comprehensive upgrade to pricing capabilities since the App Store first launched, providing developers with 700 additional price points and new pricing tools that will make it easier to set prices per App Store country or region, manage foreign exchange rate changes, and more.

Since the App Store’s inception, its world-class commerce and payments system has empowered developers to conveniently set up and sell their products and services on a global scale. The App Store’s commerce and payments system offers developers an ever-expanding set of capabilities and tools to grow their businesses, from frictionless checkout and transparent invoicing for users to robust marketing tools, tax and fraud services, and refund management.

Pricing has been foundational to these capabilities, enabling developers to choose from a variety of business models, such as one-time purchases and multiple subscription types. These new pricing enhancements will be available for apps offering auto-renewable subscriptions starting today, and for all other apps and in-app purchases in spring 2023, giving all developers unprecedented flexibility and control to price their products in 45 currencies throughout 175 storefronts.

Under the updated App Store pricing system, all developers will have the ability to select from 900 price points, which is nearly 10 times the number of price points previously available for most apps. This includes 600 new price points to choose from, with an additional 100 higher price points available upon request. To provide developers around the world with even more flexibility, price points — which will start as low as $0.29 and, upon request, go up to $10,000 — will offer an enhanced selection of price points, increasing incrementally across price ranges (for example, every $0.10 up to $10; every $0.50 between $10 and $50; etc.). See the table below for details.

In each of the App Store’s 175 storefronts, developers will be able to leverage additional pricing conventions, including those that begin with two repeating digits (e.g., ₩110,000), and will be able to price products beyond $0.99 or €X.99 endings to incorporate rounded price endings (e.g., x.00 or x.90), which are particularly useful for managing bundles and annual plans.

Starting today, developers of subscription apps will also be able to manage currency and taxes across storefronts more effortlessly by choosing a local storefront they know best as the basis for automatically generating prices across the other 174 storefronts and 44 currencies. Developers will still be able to define prices per storefront if they wish. The pricing capability by storefront will expand to all other apps in spring 2023.

For developers distributing their apps around the world, the App Store’s global equalization tools have given them a simple and convenient way to manage pricing across international markets. Today’s enhancements expand upon these capabilities, allowing developers to keep their local currency constant in any storefront of their choice, even as foreign exchange and taxes fluctuate. This means, for example, a Japanese game developer who gets most of their business from Japanese customers can set their price for the Japan storefront, and have their prices outside of the country update as foreign exchange and tax rates change. All developers will also be able to define availability of in-app purchases by storefront.

Periodically, Apple updates prices in certain regions based on changes in taxes and foreign exchange rates. This is done using publicly available exchange rate information from financial data providers to help ensure prices for in-app purchases stay equalized across all storefronts. Currently, developers can adjust pricing at any time to react to tax and foreign currency adjustments. Coming in 2023, developers with paid apps and in-app purchases will be able to set local territory pricing, which will not be impacted by automatic price adjustments.

These newly announced tools, which will begin rolling out today and continue throughout 2023, will create even more flexibility for developers to price their products while staying approachable to the hundreds of millions of users Apple serves worldwide, and in turn help developers continue to thrive on the App Store.

Learn more about auto-renewable subscriptions

Learn about pricing for auto-renewable subscriptions

November 30, 2022

The busiest season on the App Store is almost here! Make sure your apps and product pages are up to date and ready in advance of the upcoming holidays. We’re pleased to remain open throughout the season again this year and look forward to accepting your submissions. On average, 90% of submissions are reviewed in less than 24 hours. However, reviews may take a bit longer to complete from December 23 to 27.

Learn about submitting apps

Get tips to prevent review issues