Apple Developer News and Updates feed provided by Apple, Inc.
As of today, apps without trader status have been removed from the App Store in the European Union (EU) until trader status is provided and verified by Apple.
Account Holders or Admins in the Apple Developer Program will need to enter this status in App Store Connect to comply with the Digital Services Act.
You can now take advantage of upgraded security options when creating new token authentication keys for the Apple Push Notification service (APNs).
Team-scoped keys enable you to restrict your token authentication keys to either development or production environments, providing an additional layer of security and ensuring that keys are used only in their intended environments.
Topic-specific keys provide more granular control by enabling you to associate each key with a specific bundle ID, allowing for more streamlined and organized key management. This is particularly beneficial for large organizations that manage multiple apps across different teams.
Your existing keys will continue to work for all push topics and environments. At this time, you don’t have to update your keys unless you want to take advantage of the new capabilities.
For detailed instructions on how to secure your communications with APNs, read Establishing a token-based connection to APNs.
Starting February 14, 2025, new regulatory requirements in South Korea will apply to all apps with offers and trials for auto-renewing subscriptions.
To comply, if you offer trials or offers for auto-renewing subscriptions to your app or game, additional consent must be obtained for your trial or offer after the initial transaction. The App Store will help to get consent by informing the affected subscribers with an email, push notification, and in-app price consent sheet, and asking your subscribers to agree to the new price.
This additional consent must be obtained from customers within 30 days from the payment or conversion date for:
Apps that do not offer a free trial or discounted offer before a subscription converts to the regular price are not affected.
The Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) requires games to be licensed to remain available on the App Store in Vietnam. To learn more and apply for a game license, review the regulations.
Once you have obtained your license:
If you have questions on how to comply with these requirements, please contact the Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information (ABEI) under the Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications.
Here’s the story of how a few little bears led their creators right to an Apple Design Award.
Bears Gratitude is a warm and welcoming title developed by the Australian husband-and-wife team of Isuru Wanasinghe and Nayomi Hettiarachchi.
Journaling apps just don’t get much cuter: Through prompts like “Today isn’t over yet,” “I’m literally a new me,” and “Compliment someone,” the Swift-built app and its simple hand-drawn mascots encourage people to get in the habit of celebrating accomplishments, fostering introspection, and building gratitude. “And gratitude doesn’t have to be about big moments like birthdays or anniversaries,” says Wanasinghe. “It can be as simple as having a hot cup of coffee in the morning.”
ADA FACT SHEET
Download Bears Gratitude from the App Store
Wanasinghe is a longtime programmer who’s run an afterschool tutoring center in Sydney, Australia, for nearly a decade. But the true spark for Bears Gratitude and its predecessor, Bears Countdown, came from Hettiarachchi, a Sri Lankan-born illustrator who concentrated on her drawing hobby during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Wanasinghe is more direct. “The art is the heart of everything we do,” he says.
Bears Gratitude was developed by the Australian husband-and-wife team of Isuru Wanasinghe and Nayomi Hettiarachchi.
In fact, the art is the whole reason the app exists. As the pandemic months and drawings stacked up, Hettiarachchi and Wanasinghe found themselves increasingly attached to her cartoon creations, enough that they began to consider how to share them with the world. The usual social media routes beckoned, but given Wanasinghe’s background, the idea of an app offered a stronger pull.
“In many cases, you get an idea, put together a design, and then do the actual development,” he says. “In our case, it’s the other way around. The art drives everything.”
The art is the heart of everything we do.
Isuru Wanasinghe, Bears Gratitude cofounder
With hundreds of drawings at their disposal, the couple began thinking about the kinds of apps that could host them. Their first release was Bears Countdown, which employed the drawings to help people look ahead to birthdays, vacations, and other marquee moments. Countdown was never intended to be a mass-market app; the pair didn’t even check its launch stats on App Store Connect. “We’d have been excited to have 100 people enjoy what Nayomi had drawn,” says Wanasinghe. “That’s where our heads were at.”
But Countdown caught on with a few influencers and become enough of a success that the pair began thinking of next steps. “We thought, well, we’ve given people a way to look forward,” says Wanasinghe. “What about reflecting on the day you just had?’”
Hettiarachchi’s art samples get a close inspection from one of her trusted associates.
Gratitude keeps the cuddly cast from Countdown, but otherwise the app is an entirely different beast. It was also designed in what Wanasinghe says was a deliberately unusual manner. “Our design approach was almost bizarrely linear,” says Wanasinghe. “We purposely didn’t map out the app. We designed it in the same order that users experience it.”
Other unorthodox decisions followed, including the absence of a sign-in screen. “We wanted people to go straight into the experience and start writing,” he says. The home-screen journaling prompts are presented via cards that users flip through by tapping left and right. “It’s definitely a nonstandard UX,” says Wanasinghe, “but we found over and over again that the first thing users did was flip through the cards.”
Our design approach was almost bizarrely linear. We purposely didn’t map out the app. We designed it in the same order that users experience it.
Isuru Wanasinghe, Bears Gratitude cofounder
Another twist: The app’s prompts are written in the voice of the user, which Wanasinghe says was done to emphasize the personal nature of the app. “We wrote the app as if we were the only ones using it, which made it more relatable,” he says.
Then there are the bears, which serve not only as a distinguishing hook in a busy field, but also as a design anchor for its creators. “We’re always thinking: ‘Instead of trying to set our app apart, how do we make it ours?’ We use apps all the time, and we know how they behave. But here we tried to detach ourselves from all that, think of it as a blank canvas, and ask, ‘What do we want this experience to be?’”
Early design sketches for Bears Gratitude show the collection of swipe-able prompt cards.
Bears Gratitude isn’t a mindfulness app — Wanasinghe is careful to clarify that neither he nor Hettiarachchi are therapists or mental health professionals. “All we know about are the trials and tribulations of life,” he says.
But those trials and tribulations have reached a greater world. “People have said, ‘This is just something I visit every day that brings me comfort,’” says Wanasinghe. “We’re so grateful this is the way we chose to share the art. We’re plugged into people’s lives in a meaningful way.”
Meet the 2024 Apple Design Award winners
Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from finalists and winners of the Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.
Submissions for the Swift Student Challenge 2025 are now open through February 23. You have three more weeks to design, test, refine, and submit your app playground for consideration to be named one of 350 winners.
What to know:
Where to start:
The App Store facilitates billions of transactions annually to help developers grow their businesses and provide a world-class customer experience. To further support developers’ evolving business models — such as exceptionally large content catalogs, creator experiences, and subscriptions with optional add-ons — we’re introducing the Advanced Commerce API.
Developers can apply to use the Advanced Commerce API to support eligible App Store business models and more flexibly manage their In-App Purchases within their app. These purchases leverage the power of the trusted App Store commerce system, including end-to-end payment processing, tax support, customer service, and more, so developers can focus on providing great app experiences.
Starting February 17, 2025: Due to the European Union’s Digital Services Act, apps without trader status will be removed from the App Store in the European Union until trader status is provided and verified, if necessary.
As a reminder, Account Holders or Admins in the Apple Developer Program need to enter trader status in App Store Connect for apps on the App Store in the European Union in order to comply with the Digital Services Act.
As part of ongoing efforts to improve security and privacy on Apple platforms, the App Store receipt signing intermediate certificate is being updated to use the SHA-256 cryptographic algorithm. This certificate is used to sign App Store receipts, which are the proof of purchase for apps and In-App Purchases.
This update is being completed in multiple phases and some existing apps on the App Store may be impacted by the next update, depending on how they verify receipts.
Starting January 24, 2025, if your app performs on-device receipt validation and doesn’t support the SHA-256 algorithm, your app will fail to validate the receipt. If your app prevents customers from accessing the app or premium content when receipt validation fails, your customers may lose access to their content.
If your app performs on-device receipt validation, update your app to support certificates that use the SHA-256 algorithm; alternatively, use the AppTransaction and Transaction APIs to verify App Store transactions.
For more details, view TN3138: Handling App Store receipt signing certificate changes.
Starting next month, Apple will change the supported algorithms that secure server connections for Apple Pay on the Web. In order to maintain uninterrupted service, you’ll need to ensure that your production servers support one or more of the designated six ciphers before February 4, 2025.
These algorithm changes will affect any secure connection you’ve established as part of your Apple Pay integration, including the following touchpoints:
