Category: Apple Developer News

With Live Activities, your app can provide up-to-date, glanceable information — like weather updates, a plane’s departure time, or how long it’ll be until dinner is delivered — right on the Lock Screen. What’s more, thanks to lively features like the Dynamic Island on iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, Live Activities can also be a lot of fun.

Apple evangelists, designers, and engineers came together at Ask Apple to answer your questions about Live Activities and the Dynamic Island. Here are a few highlights from those conversations, including guidance about sizing and styling, when to dismiss a Live Activity, and why widgets and Live Activities are different (except when they’re not).

How do I update a Live Activity without using Apple Push Notification service (APNs)?

Your app can use a pre-existing background runtime functionality, such as Location Services, to provide Live Activity updates as you see fit. You can also use BGProcessingTask and background pushes to provide less frequent updates to your Live Activity. Keep in mind that these background tasks aren’t processed immediately by the system. You can read more below:

Displaying live data with Live Activities

The 4-hour default to dismiss a Live Activity is too long for my use case. What are the guidelines for dismissing a Live Activity after it ends?

When ending a Live Activity, you can provide an ActivityUIDismissalPolicy to tell the system when to dismiss your UI. Alternatively, you can choose to dismiss the Live Activity immediately or after a certain time has passed.

How can my app detect when someone dismisses a Live Activity?

Your app should use the activityStateUpdates async sequence to observe state changes for each Live Activity.

When an app is force quit, is the associated Live Activity dismissed?

Live Activity life cycles aren’t tied to the host app’s process, so they’ll stay if the app is force quit. Your widget extension’s life cycle is also separate. It’s entirely possible that different instances of the widget extension are called to render views for the same Live Activity, so it’s important not to store any state locally in the widget extension.

How do Live Activities and widgets differ?

Live Activities and widgets both provide glanceable information at a moment’s notice. Live Activities are great for displaying situational information related to an ongoing task that someone initiated. Good examples include food deliveries, workouts, and flight departure times. Widgets can provide glanceable information that’s always relevant. Good examples include to-do lists, this week’s weather forecast, or how close someone is to closing their rings on Apple Watch.

While both Live Activities and widgets rely on WidgetKit to lay out their UI, they’re structured a bit differently. Live Activities are a single view that updates programmatically, while widgets consist of a timeline of preconstructed views.

Should my Live Activity attempt to change the background color of the Dynamic Island?

The Dynamic Island is most immersive when you don’t provide background color or imagery — think of it purely as a canvas of foreground view elements. More design guidance is provided in the Human Interface Guidelines.

Human Interface Guidelines – Live Activities

Do Live Activities support interactive buttons?

Live Activities on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island don’t support interactive buttons or other controls. Including buttons in your Live Activity could confuse someone into thinking they’re able to interact with the view. For this reason, you should avoid displaying anything in your UI that resembles a button.

The best user experience exists within your app, which is why all interaction with a Live Activity results in opening your app. A Live Activity’s Lock Screen presentation and expanded presentation can include multiple links into your app, so you can provide different destinations, depending on the context of your Live Activity.

Are Live Activities the only way to support the Dynamic Island?

Your app can implement other system services, such as CallKit and Now Playing, that display system UI in the Dynamic Island. However, Live Activities are the only way for your app to provide its own UI in the Dynamic Island.

Is it possible to add animations to the Dynamic Island?

While there’s no support for arbitrary animations in your Live Activity views, your app can change how a Live Activity’s content updates from one state to the next. Read more in the “Animate content updates” section of the article below.

Displaying live data with Live Activities

Where can I find more documentation about Live Activities?

The ActivityKit documentationprovides a wealth of information about implementing Live Activities, including how to update and end a Live Activity using APNs. In addition, the Human Interface Guidelinesoffer design guidance and recommended sizes for the various presentations. You can also find some inspiration in the Food Truck sample project from WWDC22.

Human Interface Guidelines – Live Activities

Displaying live data with Live Activities

Updating and ending your Live Activity with ActivityKit push notifications

ActivityKit

WidgetKit

March 16, 2023

Discover how you can bring a new dimension of sound to your apps and games with Spatial Audio. We’ll show you how you can easily bring immersive audio to listeners with compatible hardware, help you take advantage of the PHASE and Audio Engine APIs, and offer recommendations on tailoring your project’s experience to tell stories in new, exciting ways. We’ll also share how apps like Endel and Odio added Spatial Audio to deliver incredible sound.

Videos

Immerse your app in Spatial Audio

Discover how spatial audio can help you provide a theater-like experience for media in your apps and on the web. We’ll show you how you can easily bring immersive audio to those listening with compatible hardware, and how to automatically deliver different listening experiences depending on…

Discover geometry-aware audio with the Physical Audio Spatialization Engine (PHASE)

Explore how geometry-aware audio can help you build complex, interactive, and immersive audio scenes for your apps and games. Meet PHASE, Apple’s spatial audio API, and learn how the Physical Audio Spatialization Engine (PHASE) keeps the sound aligned with your experience at all times — helping…

Design for spatial interaction

Discover the principles for creating intuitive physical interactions between two or more devices, as demonstrated by Apple designers who worked on features for iPhone, HomePod mini, and AirTag. Explore how you can apply these patterns to your own app when designing features for Apple platforms, and…

Feature stories

Spotlight on: Spatial Audio

Learn how developers are creating immersive surround-sound experiences.

Behind the Design: Odio

Discover how this app conjures up its 3D soundscapes.

Resources

PHASE

Audio Engine

When designing soundscapes for apps and games, the right notes can make all the difference. And when those notes are built to support multichannel audio, they might even turn someone’s head. (Literally.)

Endel and Odio are just two of the many apps and games taking advantage of Spatial Audio. They use multichannel mixes, Core Audio, and AVFoundation to add texture and dimensionality, creating resonating surround-sound experiences that further immerse listeners into the world within their apps.

Design for spatial interaction

Discover the principles for creating intuitive physical interactions between two or more devices, as demonstrated by Apple designers who worked on features for iPhone, HomePod mini, and AirTag. Explore how you can apply these patterns to your own app when designing features for Apple platforms, and…

Endel (pictured above) conjures up personalized and adaptive soundscapes based on biometrics and environment to help people focus and get better sleep. Its inaugural Spatial Audio soundscape — one with the satisfyingly otherworldly name of Spatial Orbit — brings the app’s remarkable mix of art and AI to a new dimension.

“It feels like you’re inside a vast, glittery space,” says Dmitry Evgrafov, Endel cofounder and chief sound officer. “It’s almost like the sonic equivalent of pointillism, where the small dots create a structure themselves and you kind of drown in the thing. It’s a very beautiful state, and it’s not something you can reproduce in stereo.”

When bringing Spatial Audio into their ecosystem, the Endel team’s first task was determining if the technology was compatible with their ever-changing, generative soundscape. That job fell largely to Kyrylo Bulatsev, cofounder and chief technology officer. “[Spatial Audio] meant we had to add one more dimension to the non-static element,” he says. “Besides choosing what sound to play and when, we had to think about where the sound would be and how it would move around you.”

That soundscape also had to hit the “thin line between augmenting an experience and making it distracting,” Evgrafov says. That’s because while most apps (and games and movies and songs) are designed for active engagement, Endel aims to be a perfect background companion — enhancing your experience without pulling from your focus. “Our use case is different from other products that utilize the technology,” says Evgrafov (whom fellow cofounder Oleg Stavisky credits with “all the beautiful sounds in the app”).

It’s almost like the sonic equivalent of pointillism.

Dmitry Evgrafov, *Endel* cofounder and chief sound officer

A pianist and musician with 10 albums to his credit, Evgrafov certainly knows his way around stereo. “But randomization of the position of audio in the space? That’s a whole different beast,” he says.

The first serious prototype of Spatial Orbit was earthbound, set to a realistic jungle scene. “The idea was you’d walk around this magical Garden of Eden and exotic tropical animals would sing around you,” he says. “We had a harp playing by the water, a creek, birds that don’t exist in the real world, stuff like that.”

Similar ideas kept coming: a Gregorian choir that slowly shuffled past you while chanting, field recordings from inside a cave. Although the concepts were cool and the prototypes sounded great, the team kept running up against the same problem. “They weren’t Endel,” says Evgrafov. “They transported you to a place, but that meant people were using the app consciously. They didn’t match what we stood for.”

The final version of Spatial Orbit does match what Endel stands for — and achieves the synthesis of art and technology that Endel strives for. “The rain [in our soundscape] is almost metaphorical,” says Evgrafov. “It’s got this slightly augmented feel that allows you to just drown a little and be with your thoughts, focus on your book, or whatever you’re doing.”

Tweaking the soundscape was an adventure in itself. “Watching people test Endel is kind of a funny exercise,” laughs Stavitsky. That’s because there’s really not an established way to test an personalized auto-generated soundscape for a group of people all at once.

[The rain has] this slightly augmented feel that allows you to just drown a little and be with your thoughts, focus on your book, or whatever you’re doing.

Dmitry Evgrafov

“We invented the process and the toolset,” says Evgrafov. It involved a lot of people wandering Endel’s Berlin offices… and elsewhere. “It was also a lot of me in public spaces just staring at nothing, like a cat.”

In the end, Spatial Orbit captures that elusive mix of innovative technology and artistic resolve. “When we realized the science was there and that it still checked all the Endel boxes, it was a big relief,” says Evgrafov. “We thought, ‘OK, we can be non-intrusive and Spatial at the same time.’”

Download Endel from the App Store

Odio also focuses on creating great ambient soundscapes — but with a sci-fi twist. “I want our composers to imagine inventing planets and filling them up with sound,” says Joon Kwak, the app’s Seoul-based cofounder. “We want to walk people through these new planets.”

The app’s soundscapes, which can evoke anything from a crashing waterfall to a buzzy digital backdrop to the spooky calm of the deep sea, use head tracking and multichannel audio to create a truly mesmerizing mix. (The app is also a visual feast, with each soundscape accompanied by ever-shifting techno-tinged art.)

But you’re no passive listener in these audio realms. The individual elements that make up each soundscape can be manipulated through an imaginative, playful UI that lets you reposition each audio element (like that waterfall) anywhere you like.

Befitting its futuristic feel, Odio’s backstory is one of serendipitous meetings, well-timed hardware and software releases, and a stroke of good fortune. Kwak conceived the app’s initial version as a graduation project at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Originally known as Virtual Sky, the prototype contained the bones of what would become Odio, but was largely grounded in real-world sounds. It also required a mess of hardware and special equipment — all of which was rendered pretty much irrelevant once AirPods with Spatial Audio arrived.

“I was depressed for a while,” laughs Kwak. “I was like, ‘I’ve been working on this for months, and now it’s pointless!’ But then I thought about it more deeply and realized, ‘Oh, this just means I don’t need to provide hardware,’ and it was actually great.”

Kwak partnered with Volst, a company that was interested in a 3D soundscape app. With the building blocks in place, Odio’s UI developer and designer, Rutger Schimmel, took on the challenge of bringing Kwak’s project to life — a process that went much faster than expected.

I want our composers to image inventing planets and filling them up with sound.

Joon Kwak, *Odio* cofounder

“We knew the AirPods had [surround sound] support, but we were skeptical,” he says. “We thought, ‘OK, they have head tracking, but it’s probably just for first-party stuff.’ But we were still excited, so we quickly set up an Xcode project to get the data from the AirPods to the device.”

They had a prototype up and running on the headphones within minutes. “We were blown away by how easy it was,” Schimmel says. “And in about an hour we decided on excellent 3D audio frameworks from Apple that were the perfect foundation for what we were working on.” Coding began in January. By April, the team had a Swift-built demo ready to go.

To build an Odio soundscape, composers like Kwak, Odio sound designer Max Frimout, and a team of outside musicians collaborate — generally in Logic Pro — by blending ambient sounds, synthetic bells and whistles, and music.

After the soundscapes are completed and duly field-tested in coffee shops, parks, and subways, the artists hand their files over to Schimmel. For a role that involves cutting-edge design, immersive audio, and incredible degrees of customization, Schimmel’s toolbox is surprisingly uncluttered: AVAudioEnvironmentNode (AVKit) for creating the 3D audio environment, CMHeadphoneMotionManager (Core Motion) to access headphone motion data, and Sentry for error tracking and QA.

“Everything else in Odio is created from scratch in Swift — from data management to interacting with soundscapes to real-time buffering the interactive sound files,” Schimmel says.

The result is a remarkable example of the power and simplicity of designing for Spatial Audio. “Honestly,” Schimmel says, “most of the hard work is done by the composer.”

Download Odio from the App Store

Discover geometry-aware audio with the Physical Audio Spatialization Engine (PHASE)

Explore how geometry-aware audio can help you build complex, interactive, and immersive audio scenes for your apps and games. Meet PHASE, Apple’s spatial audio API, and learn how the Physical Audio Spatialization Engine (PHASE) keeps the sound aligned with your experience at all times — helping…

Immerse your app in Spatial Audio

Discover how spatial audio can help you provide a theater-like experience for media in your apps and on the web. We’ll show you how you can easily bring immersive audio to those listening with compatible hardware, and how to automatically deliver different listening experiences depending on…

In December, we announced the most comprehensive upgrade to pricing capabilities since the App Store first launched, including additional price points and new tools to manage pricing by storefront. Starting today, these upgrades and new prices are now available for all app and in‑app purchase types, including paid apps and one‑time in‑app purchases.

• More flexible price points. Choose from 900 price points — nearly 10 times the number of price points previously available for paid apps and one‑time in‑app purchases. These options also offer more flexibility, increasing incrementally across price ranges (for example, every $0.10 up to $10, every $0.50 between $10 and $50, etc.).

• Enhanced global pricing. Use globally equalized prices that follow the most common pricing conventions in each country or region, so you can provide pricing that’s more relevant to customers.

• Worldwide options for base price. Specify a country or region you’re familiar with as the basis for globally equalized prices across the other 174 storefronts and 43 currencies for paid apps and one‑time in‑app purchases. Prices you set for this base storefront won’t be adjusted by Apple to account for taxes or foreign currency changes, and you’ll be able to set prices for each storefront if you prefer.

• Regional options for availability. Define the availability of in‑app purchases (including subscriptions) by storefront, so you can deliver content and services customized for each market.

Get ready for enhanced global pricing updates in May

The App Store’s global equalization tools provide a simple and convenient way to manage pricing across international markets. On May 9, 2023, pricing for existing apps and one‑time in‑app purchases will be updated across all 175 App Store storefronts to take advantage of new enhanced global pricing. The updated prices will be globally equalized to your selected base country or region using publicly available exchange rate information from financial data providers. These price points will also follow the most common conventions in each country or region so that prices are more relevant to customers.

You can now update your current pricing to take advantage of the enhanced global pricing using App Store Connect or the App Store Connect API. If you haven’t made price updates for your existing apps and one‑time in‑app purchases by May 9, Apple will update them for you using your current price in the United States as the basis. If you’d like a different price to be used as the basis, update the base country or region for your apps or in‑app purchases to your preferred storefront. You can also choose to manually manage prices on storefronts of your choice instead of using the equalized price.

Learn how to select a base storefront

Learn how to set in-app purchase availability

Learn how to view the new pricing

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