5.3 Gaming, Gambling, and Lotteries. Gambling, gaming, and lotteries can be tricky to manage and tend to be one of the most regulated offerings on the App Store. Only include this functionality if you’ve fully vetted your legal obligations everywhere you make your app available and are prepared for extra time during the review process. Ultimately Apple started to shift its feelings on gambling apps. The bottom line is that they wanted the devices to be sticky with users, so offering more native apps made more sense as a whole. As a compromise, the company decided to restrict gambling app use to the countries where online gambling.
App Store Review Guideline updates now available
February 1, 2021
The App Store is a safe and trusted place for customers to discover and download apps, and a great opportunity for developers. The App Store Review Guideline changes and clarifications support new features in upcoming OS releases, better protect customers, and help your apps go through the review process as smoothly as possible. Review the updates below. Please note that all new apps and app updates submitted to the App Store must follow the revised guideline 5.1.2(i) by early spring 2021.
- 1.4.3: Clarified the prohibition of promoting certain substances: “Apps that encourage consumption of tobacco and vape products, illegal drugs, or excessive amounts of alcohol are not permitted on the App Store. Apps that encourage minors to consume any of these substances will be rejected. Facilitating the sale of controlled substances (except for licensed pharmacies), marijuana, or tobacco is not allowed.”
- 2.3: Clarified the information that must accurately reflect the app’s core experience: “Customers should know what they’re getting when they download or buy your app, so make sure all your app metadata, including privacy information, your app description, screenshots, and previews accurately reflect the app’s core experience and remember to keep them up-to-date with new versions.”
- 2.3.7: Clarified what metadata shouldn’t include: “Choose a unique app name, assign keywords that accurately describe your app, and don’t try to pack any of your metadata with trademarked terms, popular app names, pricing information, or other irrelevant phrases just to game the system. App names must be limited to 30 characters. Metadata such as app names, subtitles, screenshots, and previews should not include prices, terms, or descriptions that are not specific to the metadata type. App subtitles are a great way to provide additional context for your app; they must follow our standard metadata rules and should not include inappropriate content, reference other apps, or make unverifiable product claims. Apple may modify inappropriate keywords at any time or take other appropriate steps to prevent abuse.”
- 2.4.5(viii): Removed Rosetta as an example: “Apps should run on the currently shipping OS and may not use deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g., Java).”
- 3.1.1: Clarified that these items must be sold through in-app purchase: “Gift cards, certificates, vouchers, and coupons which can be redeemed for digital goods or services can only be sold in your app using in-app purchase.”
- 3.1.1: Clarified how apps can enable customers to “tip” developers: “Apps may use in-app purchase currencies to enable customers to “tip” the developer or digital content providers in the app.”
- 3.1.1: Deleted: “Remember to assign the correct purchasability type or your app will be rejected.”
- 3.1.2(a): Clarified how certain games can offer a subscription across third-party apps and services: “Games offered in a streaming game service subscription may offer a single subscription that is shared across third-party apps and services; however, they must be downloaded directly from the App Store, must be designed to avoid duplicate payment by a subscriber, and should not disadvantage non-subscriber customers.”
- 3.1.3(c): Clarified what enterprise users can access and what purchase methods they can use: “Enterprise Services: If your app is only sold directly by you to organizations or groups for their employees or students (for example professional databases and classroom management tools), you may allow enterprise users to access previously-purchased content or subscriptions. Consumer, single user, or family sales must use in-app purchase.”
- 3.1.3(d): Changed terminology from “person-to-person experiences” to “person-to-person services” to clarify that services provided by one individual to another are in scope: “If your app enables the purchase of realtime person-to-person services between two individuals (for example tutoring students, medical consultations, real estate tours, or fitness training), you may use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments. One-to-few and one-to-many realtime services must use in-app purchase.”
- 3.2.1(viii): Clarified who can create apps for these services. Removed option to use a public API: “Apps used for financial trading, investing, or money management should come from the financial institution performing such services.”
- 3.2.2(ix): Removed duplicative section regarding forcing users to perform actions, which is fully covered by 3.2.2(vi); renumbered former 3.2.2(x).
- 4.2.3(iii): Clarified the information that certain apps need to disclose: “If your app needs to download additional resources in order to function on initial launch, disclose the size of the download and prompt users before doing so.”
- 5.1.1(ix): Clarified that gambling is a heavily-regulated field in scope: “Apps that provide services in highly-regulated fields (such as banking and financial services, healthcare, gambling and air travel) or that require sensitive user information should be submitted by a legal entity that provides the services, and not by an individual developer.”
- 5.1.2(i): Added: “You must receive explicit permission from users via the App Tracking Transparency APIs to track their activity. Learn more about tracking.”
- After You Submit: Reordered the paragraph describing appeals for clarity.
- Apple has unveiled its M1 chip and the first computers that will run on it: a MacBook Air, a 13-inch MacBook Pro, and a Mac Mini.
- The company back in June first announced its intention to move away from Intel and use its own chips based on the same mobile architecture as the iPhone for future Macs.
- Apple isn't the first to design laptops based on mobile chip designs. But such laptops are usually meant for lightweight tasks, not heavy-duty computing tasks like video editing or coding.
- Apple made it clear this wasn't the case for its Mac chips, which it envisions as the future of its laptop and desktop line.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Apple laid out its vision for the future of computing on Tuesday with the introduction of the M1, its first Mac chip designed in-house, and the new devices it will power: a new version of the MacBook Air, a 13-inch MacBook Pro, and a Mac Mini.
The shift allows Apple to break away from Intel and exercise more freedom over the design, development, and launch cycle of its Mac computers. With its own chips, Apple can finally bring the 'secret sauce' long since incorporated into the iPhone — homemade chips that allow it to fine-tune performance and features — to the Mac.
But it's also a major gamble. Apple isn't the first tech giant to release laptops with chips based on the Arm standard, the same basic architecture as those found in mobile devices. But Apple is taking a decidedly different approach.
Arm-based Windows PCs, like Microsoft's Surface Pro X, boast long battery life and lightweight designs but often fall short of their more traditional Intel-based brethren when it comes to the raw computing power necessary to do real work.
Apple has said the new devices running on its M1 chip are the best of all possible worlds: The new MacBook Air doesn't have any fans, promising to be the quietest MacBook yet, while the updated MacBook Pro is said to show big gains in battery life over the previous model. Even with all of that, Apple says the M1 chip gives these machines, including that new Mac Mini, better performance than its own Intel-based line or most Windows PCs.
If Apple is correct, then it points to an exciting future for the whole Mac lineup. But if these machines, and the chip that powers them, fall short of expectations, the future of Apple's computer business is at risk.
Windows has already been moving this direction
In recent years, tech companies like Lenovo, Microsoft, and Samsung have introduced laptops powered by chips that use the Arm architecture: a chip design licensed from the British company of the same name. Known for their balance of energy efficiency and processing power, Arm chips are best known for their role in the smartphone revolution, though they can more recently be found in everything from drones to data centers.
In laptops, those processors have helped Windows devices like Samsung's Galaxy Book S, Lenovo's Yoga 5G, and Microsoft's Surface Pro X offer ultrathin devices that are intended to bring the convenience of a phone or tablet together with the versatility of a more traditional laptop. In fact, all three of those devices offer cellular connectivity, and Microsoft's and Lenovo's do double duty as a full-fledged Windows 10-based tablet.
Still, the history of Windows on Arm is rocky: Microsoft launched an Arm-powered Surface tablet back in 2012 powered by a specially designed Windows RT operating system, based on Windows 8. That device, and Windows RT itself, were flops largely because of issues with app compatibility and performance. Most Windows apps were built for Intel processors; Windows RT couldn't run all of them, and even when it could they rarely ran as well.
No doubt, things have improved on that front. Microsoft has invested in the technology necessary to run most Intel-based apps on an Arm-based Windows machine, making them a much more reasonable proposition.
Apple Gambling Apps Real Money
But it's also worth flagging The Verge's review of this year's Surface Pro X refresh, which praised Microsoft's app compatibility work and the design of the hardware but also flagged some headaches arising from the fact that it's not based on Intel.
Apple's big bet is that the M1 is as good or better than Intel's chips
Apple's M1 chips are based on the Arm architecture, just like those found in Windows PCs. That, however, is where the similarities largely end. The M1 was custom-designed by Apple based on a decade spent building highly acclaimed iPhone and iPad processors. Those processors are a big part of Apple's smartphone success.
That may be why Apple is so confident in declaring the M1 the future of the Mac, full-stop. Where the Windows PC industry is still exploring the possibilities of using Arm rather than Intel's x86 processor architecture, Apple says it hopes to have the Mac line entirely on its own chips within two years, starting with the devices announced Tuesday.
That's an important distinction, because it means it's banking that M1-powered Macs will be as good as or better than their Intel-based predecessors for video editing, photo processing, music creation, coding, or any other computing-heavy creative tasks. In fact, Apple's presentation showcased the potential for these new Macs to do all of those things.
By comparison, it would be hard to recommend an Arm-based Windows 10 PC for anything other than light web browsing, document editing, or Netflix.
The payoff for Apple could be huge
The decision to move away from Intel is a dramatic one, but it could pay off.
Apple Casino
Without relying on Intel and its release schedule, Apple gets the flexibility to design updated processors alongside the Macs they will go on to power. That, in turn, means Apple can offer new features in the Mac that might not have been possible before.
For example, on Tuesday, Apple showcased how quickly an M1-powered Mac could wake from sleep, similarly to an iPhone. Macs can also benefit from Apple's image signal processor, used to make camera images crisper and cleaner on the iPhone. In fact, M1-based Macs can actually run iPhone and iPad apps, thanks to the similarity of the chips.
Gambling Apple Pay
There are still lingering questions over how well the devices actually live up to Apple's lofty promises, and we may not get answers until the devices officially start shipping next week. For starters, it will be interesting to see how well older Mac apps run on the new silicon, especially in light of Windows' difficulties there.
After all, Apple's initial rollout of Catalyst, its program for enabling developers to port iPad apps over to the Mac, encountered some road bumps in its early days, as Bloomberg previously reported.
Apple Store Gambling Apps
Still, the commitment to bring its new M1 chip to powerful computers like the MacBook Pro suggests Apple is confident it will work — and views this risk as being a necessary one for the Mac's future.