What’s new for Apple developers

Learn about the key technologies and exciting capabilities available in the latest SDKs for Apple platforms.

Apple Intelligence

Apple Intelligence is the personal intelligence system that puts powerful generative models right at the core of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It powers incredible new features to help people communicate, work, and express themselves.

New Writing Tools work automatically in text fields from standard UI frameworks within your app. The Image Playground API delivers an easy-to-use experience where people can create fun, playful images right in your app. Genmoji bring fun new ways to communicate by providing the ability to create an emoji for any occasion. And Siri will be able to access text displayed in your app, and take hundreds of new actions in and across apps using the App Intents you make available.

Learn about Apple Intelligence

Xcode

Transform your ideas into code with predictive code completion and faster previews. Supercharge your builds with explicit modules. Get deeper insight into your app’s performance with improved diagnostics and the flame graph view in Instruments. And bring your app to even more people around the world with enhancements to localization Catalogs.

Swift

Swift 6 makes it easier to write concurrent code correctly with a new, optional language mode that analyzes your code at compile-time and diagnoses possible data races. This release also brings other enhancements to concurrency and generics, as well as improvements to Language Server Protocol support.

Watch the latest videos

SwiftUI

SwiftUI is the best way to build apps across Apple platforms. Discover new capabilities to customize the look and feel of your apps, as well as improved interoperability with UIKit and AppKit when building animations and gestures. You can also take advantage of new text animations, plot functions in charts, take greater control of volumes and spaces in visionOS, and more.

Watch the latest videos

SwiftData

SwiftData offers an expressive and lightweight API for modeling and persisting your app’s data using pure Swift code. New APIs allow you to build custom data stores, work with transaction history, model indices and compound uniqueness constraints, and more.

Watch the latest videos

Swift Testing

Built for Swift from the ground up, Swift Testing is a new framework with expressive APIs that make it easy to write tests. Swift Testing uses macros like #expect to capture complex expressions and provide rich, detailed output when a test fails. Swift Testing includes features like parameterization to easily run the same test over a series of values, and tagging to selectively run tests based on specified criteria. And the results are easy to read with full support in Xcode 16.

Learn about Swift Testing

Watch the latest video

App Intents

New orchestration capabilities provided by Apple Intelligence and significant enhancements to App Intents will enable Siri to take hundreds of new actions in and across apps. Using the Transferable API, File Representations, Item Providers, Spotlight Index, and more, you can make your entities more meaningful to the platform. Plus, you can provide powerful functionality in Siri and Spotlight. You can also explore new APIs for error handling, deferred properties, and associated enums.

Watch the latest videos

SiriKit

Apps that have adopted SiriKit will automatically benefit from enhancements coming to Siri with no additional work, thanks to Apple Intelligence. Siri has more resilient request handling, with the ability to process requests — even when users stumble over their words or change their request mid-sentence. Siri also maintains conversational context and can understand when users reference something from a previous request.

Watch the latest videos

Machine learning

Core ML

Updates to Core ML will help you optimize and run advanced generative machine learning and AI models on device faster and more efficiently. Core ML Tools offer more granular and composable weight compression techniques to help you bring your large language models and diffusion models to Apple silicon. Models can now hold multiple functions and efficiently manage state, enabling more flexible and efficient execution of large language models and adapters. The Core ML framework also adds a new MLTensor type that provides an efficient, simple, and familiar API for expressing operations on multi-dimensional arrays. And Core ML performance reports in Xcode have been updated to provide more insight into support and estimated cost of each operation in your model.

Create ML

Object tracking, the first spatial computing template, is designed to help you track real world objects in your visionOS app. Enhance your customized model training workflow with the new data preview functionality in the Create ML app and new Swift APIs from Create ML Components that help you create time series models directly within your app.

Machine learning APIs

The new Translation framework allows you to translate text across different languages in your app. The Vision framework API has been redesigned to leverage modern Swift features, and also supports two new features: image aesthetics and holistic body pose. And the Natural Language framework offers extended language support with multilingual contextual embedding.

Watch the latest videos

RealityKit

RealityKit 4 aligns its rich feature set across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro. Reality Composer Pro, a new tool that launched with Apple Vision Pro, enables development of spatial apps on all these platforms.

Shaders built with MaterialX, portals, particles, and many other features can now be used with RealityView on all four platforms. This includes APIs for adding materials, shader-based hover effects, and virtual lighting, as well as new features — like blend shapes, inverse kinematics, skeletal poses, and animation timelines — that expand character animation capabilities.

RealityKit 4 also provides more direct access to rendering with new APIs for low-level mesh and textures, which work with Metal compute shaders. And because Xcode view debugging now supports inspecting 3D scene content, it’s easier than ever to inspect and debug your RealityKit content.

Watch the latest videos

Widgets and Live Activities

Controls

Now it’s faster and easier for people to complete frequent tasks from your apps with new controls in Control Center, on the Lock Screen, and with the Action button. Controls can toggle a setting, execute an action, or deep link right to a specific experience — and you can create them with just a few lines of code and the new Controls API.

Watch the latest video

More shared capabilities

Widgets and Live Activities share even more capabilities across platforms in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and watchOS 11. Widgets on Apple Watch now support interactivity and animations, and widgets on iPhone and iPad allow for accenting specific parts of a widget to make them stand out when the Home Screen is tinted. The Smart Stack in watchOS 11 is even smarter with the ability to add relevancy to widgets so they show up when they’re needed most.

Live Activities now appear in the Smart Stack on Apple Watch, so people can get real-time updates about events — like sports scores or delivery tracking. A Live Activity can even launch your app on Apple Watch, if you have one.

Watch the latest video

Notifications

The all-new broadcast capability from the Apple Push Notification service makes it easier for you to deliver updates to your Live Activities at scale. With broadcast push notifications, you can now reach all your subscribed users by sending just a single push notification.

Learn about notifications

Watch the latest video

Game Porting Toolkit 2

Accelerate your timeline, whether you’re bringing an existing game or one that’s currently in development. With the Game Porting Toolkit 2, it’s never been easier to bring advanced games to Mac, iPad, and iPhone — and to deliver great experiences for players. 

Learn about the Game Porting Toolkit 2

Metal

Metal powers hardware-accelerated graphics on Apple platforms. Now you can naturally port apps from other platforms with added support for global bindings and extensions to ray tracing. Residency sets let you quickly and easily group resources to manage residency. And it’s even simpler to target Mac, iPad, and iPhone with the same code, thanks to a unified API and shader build process.

Learn about Metal

Passkeys

Passkeys are a replacement for passwords that are more secure, easier to use, and can’t be phished. They offer faster sign-in, fewer password resets, and reduced support costs. Use the new automatic passkey upgrade API to create a passkey when someone signs in to your app and to let them know that the passkey was saved — all without interrupting their flow.

Watch the latest video

visionOS enhancements

Volumetric APIs

Create apps with richer spatial experiences that take full advantage of depth and space and can run side by side with other apps in the Shared Space. Now you can resize volumes by using the SwiftUI scene modifier windowResizability. Volumes can now have a fixed or dynamic scale, so when the 3D object moves away from the user it either appears constant in size or gets smaller as it moves away. And ornaments can now be affixed to volumes.

TabletopKit

This new framework allows for easy development of collaborative experiences centered around a table by handling the manipulation of cards and pieces, establishing placement and layout, and defining game boards.

Enterprise APIs

New APIs for visionOS grant enhanced sensor access and increased control, so you can create more powerful enterprise solutions and spatial experiences. Access the main camera, spatial barcode and QR code scanning, the Apple Neural Engine, and more.

Inputs

Updates to inputs on Apple Vision Pro let you decide if you want the user’s hands to appear in front of or behind the digital content.

Additional features

Capabilities for fidelity of scene understanding have been greatly extended. Planes can now be detected in all orientations and allow anchoring objects on surfaces in your surroundings. Room Anchors consider the user’s surroundings on a per-room basis. And the new Object Tracking API for visionOS lets you attach content to individual objects around the user.

Watch the latest videos

iPadOS enhancements

Redesigned tab bar

Floating at the top of your app, the redesigned tab bar makes it easy for people to jump to their favorite tabs. And it turns into a sidebar for moments when they want to dive deeper. It’s now even simpler to build important interactions, like customization, menus, and drag and drop. So you can accomplish more, with less code.

Watch the latest video

Refined animations

Your apps can take advantage of the latest refined animations — like the zoom transition in Photos, which is precisely controlled by touch and can even be interrupted as it’s happening to keep your app feeling responsive.

Watch the latest video

Updated document launch view

Create a bespoke look for your app and connect your launch experience to your brand. You can customize actions, change the background, and add fun animated assets to bring the header to life.

Watch the latest video

watchOS enhancements

Double Tap API

Define a primary action in your app, so people can just double tap to do what matters most.

Smart Stack

Use cues, including time, date, location, daily routine (like bedtime), and more to have the Smart Stack suggest your widget at just the right moment. With the AccessoryWidgetGroup template you can provide three separate views and deep link to different parts of your app. And you can add interactivity to let people perform actions without leaving the widget.

Watch the latest video

tvOS enhancements

It’s easy to use SwiftUI to create familiar layouts and controls as you migrate from TVMLKit, with even more APIs available for tvOS (like the use of accent color through asset catalogs). SwiftUI is the best way to build apps on all Apple platforms and can help you bring your content into the living room with tvOS 18.

Watch the latest video

App Store and StoreKit

Discover new ways to promote your app or game, merchandise In‑App Purchases, re-engage subscribers, and more.

  • New promotion features let you nominate your apps for featuring on the App Store, share exciting moments (like a version launch) with marketing assets generated for you, and deep link to specific content in your app from custom product pages.
  • Enhancements to StoreKit views give you more flexibility and customization options when building your merchandising experiences.
  • Improvements to StoreKit testing in Xcode and the Apple Sandbox environment help you test additional purchase scenarios.
  • Offer codes for macOS apps let you provide discounted or free subscriptions for a period of time. Win-back offers give you a new way to re-engage previous subscribers.
  • The App Store for Apple Vision Pro will launch in new markets in June 2024, so you can bring your apps and games to even more people around the world.

Learn more about App Store updates

Wallet and Apple Pay

Make your event tickets shine with rich pass designs in Wallet, bring great Apple Pay experiences to even more people with third-party browser support, and use new API updates to integrate Apple Pay into even more purchasing flows.

Watch the latest video

TipKit

Focused on feature discovery, the TipKit framework makes it easy to display helpful tips in your app. Now you can sequence tips so features are discovered in the ideal order, make tips reusable with custom tip identifiers, match the look and feel of your app, and sync tips using CloudKit syncing.

Watch the latest video

Maps

MapKit and MapKit JS offer powerful new ways for you integrate Maps into your apps and websites.

  • Showcase the places your users care about most with the all-new Place Card API.
  • Quickly and easily access the places that are relevant to your app or website with Place ID.
  • Integrate Maps into your websites without coding required with the new Embed API.
  • Get more robust and relevant results than ever with the improved Search capability, which includes search pagination, bounding box filters, and more.

Watch the latest video

SF Symbols

SF Symbols 6 brings more than 800 new symbols, updated annotation tools, and new and enhanced configurable animations that make symbols even more expressive. The new wiggle, rotate, and breathe options respond to user input, convey status changes, and signal ongoing activity, leveraging existing symbol layer structures to enable compatibility with custom symbols. Magic replace allows symbols to more intelligently transition between related variants. And many of the new symbols are localized across several international scripts.

Learn about SF Symbols

Watch the latest video

HealthKit

HealthKit is now available on Apple Vision Pro, giving you new ways to create innovative health and fitness experiences that take advantage of the infinite canvas in visionOS. And new APIs for mental health and wellbeing let you help your users track their emotions and moods, as well as understand their risk for depression or anxiety.

Watch the latest video

Accessibility

Breakthrough features like Eye Tracking and Hover Typing on iPhone and iPad, along with new accessibility APIs like Music Haptics, can help make your app more inclusive than ever. When integrated with existing features like Dynamic Type and VoiceOver, these enhancements make it easier than ever to deliver high-quality experiences to everyone.

Learn about Acessibility

And SwiftUI makes it easy to build amazing experiences that are accessible to everyone.

Watch the latest video

Enterprise and education

Managing devices

Built-in Device Management frameworks let enterprise organizations and educational institutions deploy, manage, and secure Apple devices at scale. Apple Vision Pro now supports Zero-Touch deployments for IT with Automated Device Enrollment, and includes more management controls with a host of configurations, commands, and restrictions.

Updates to Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager make it easier for IT teams to manage Activation Lock and adopt Managed Apple IDs. IT teams can now also manage Safari extensions for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. And software update management now includes the ability to manage beta updates, making it easier for IT to test new software releases early.

Watch the latest video

Enterprise APIs for visionOS

New APIs for visionOS grant enhanced sensor access and increased control, so you can create more powerful enterprise solutions and spatial experiences. Access the main camera, spatial barcode and QR code scanning, the Apple Neural Engine, and more.

Watch the latest video

CarPlay

The next generation of CarPlay lets vehicle systems work with iPhone to create even more cohesive experiences that showcase the best of the car and iPhone. And it allows for the configuration and customization of special experiences for each vehicle model.

Watch the latest video

Documentation & sample code

Browse a selection of documentation and sample code for new technologies introduced at WWDC24.

Release notes

View detailed information on API changes in the latest released versions, including each beta release.

Apple Worldwide Developer Conference

MAY 2024
Hello Developer
Hello
It won’t be long now! WWDC24 takes place online from June 10 through 14, and we’re here to help you get ready for the biggest developer event of the year. In this edition:Explore Pathways, a brand-new way to learn about developing for Apple platforms. Meet three Distinguished Winners of this year’s Swift Student Challenge.Get great tips from the SharePlay team.Browse new developer activities about accessibility, machine learning, and more.
xyz
Introducing PathwaysIf you’re new to developing for Apple platforms, we’ve got an exciting announcement. Pathways are simple and easy-to-navigate collections of the videos, documentation, and resources you’ll need to start building great apps and games. Because Pathways are self-directed and can be followed at your own pace, they’re the perfect place to begin your journey.Explore Pathways for Swift, SwiftUI, design, games, visionOS, App Store distribution, and getting started as an Apple developer. Dive into Pathways
xyzMeet three Distinguished Winners of the Swift Student ChallengeElena Galluzzo, Dezmond Blair, and Jawaher Shaman all drew inspiration from their families to create their winning app playgrounds. Now, they share the hope that their apps can make an impact on others as well. Read about Elena, Dezmond, and Jawaher
 Meet with App Review online to discuss the App Review Guidelines and explore best practices for a smooth review process.Sign up for May 14 Join us in Bengaluru for a special in-person activity to commemorate Global Accessibility Awareness Day.Sign up for May 15 Learn how Apple machine learning frameworks can help you create more intelligent apps and games in an online activity.Sign up for May 19
New this month

Discover Apple Pencil Pro Bring even richer and more immersive interactions to your iPad app with new features, like squeeze gestures, haptic feedback, and barrel-roll angle tracking.Learn more
The rise of Tide GuideHere’s the swell story of how fishing with his grandfather got Tucker MacDonald hooked into creating his tide-predicting app.Read more

Explore simple, safe transactions with In-App PurchaseTake advantage of powerful global pricing tools, promotional features, analytics only available from Apple, built-in customer support, and fraud detection.Learn more


Get shared insights from the SharePlay teamLearn about shared experiences, spatial Personas, that magic “shockwave” effect, and more.Read the Q&A
Developer news and documentation 
 Explore the new framework for showing an inline preview in a web browser.Convert Pages, Numbers, and Keynote files to PDF Check out an update on data-independent timing. Writing ARM64 code for Apple platforms Get new and enhanced guidance on virtual hands and interactive elements in visionOS, sheets in iPadOS, and more.Explore the HIG

Supporting your App’s success

Apple offers a series of complimentary app marketing services to help get your app discovered.

Promoting your apps
Take advantage of marketing guidance, tools, promotional offers, and more to help drive discovery.

App Analytics
Measure your app’s performance and get unique insights with a variety of tools in App Store Connect.

Ratings and reviews
Ask for ratings and respond to reviews to improve your app’s discoverability, encourage downloads, and build rapport.

App updates
Stay competitive by engaging current users and attracting new ones with regular app updates.

Announcing the App Store Award Finalists

For over a decade, the App Store editorial team has taken a moment at the end of the year to celebrate the very best apps and games. As always, we focus on technical innovation, user experience, and design. Then we consider the impact these apps and games have had on our lives. 

iPhone App of the Year Finalists

AllTrailsDuolingoFlighty

These apps helped us explore a new language, the hiking trails in our community, and the world at large.

iPhone Game of the Year Finalists

AfterplaceHonkai: Star RailVampire Survivors

Our favourite iPhone games sent us on unforgettable intergalactic voyages, into the jaws of monstrous hordes, and to a fantasy land filled with surprises (and wry humour).

iPad App of the Year Finalists

ConceptsDaVinci ResolvePrêtàMakeup

This year we learned to express our creativity through multiple mediums—doodles, digital film, and daring makeup looks.

iPad Game of the Year Finalists

Lost in PlayPocket City 2

Want to build an incredible city? Journey through a child’s imagination? Meet this year’s iPad Game of the Year finalists.

Mac App of the Year Finalists

Linearity CurvePhotomatorPortal

Skillfully designed graphics, state-of-the-art photo editing, and mesmerizing escapes. We were instantly immersed in the worlds these apps transported us to—or inspired us to create.

Mac Game of the Year Finalists

ELEX IILies of PReturn to Monkey Island

Whether you’re pointing and clicking through a swashbuckling adventure, duelling deranged puppets, or jetpacking across a post-apocalyptic world, the power of Apple silicon brings these brilliant games to life.

Download these games on the Mac App Store.

Apple Arcade Game of the Year Finalists

CityscapesHello Kitty Island AdventureStitch

Apple Arcade delivered endless entertainment this year. We embroidered beautiful patterns, simulated a sprawling metropolis, and made adorable friends on a tropical island.

Apple Watch App of the Year Finalists

PlannySmartGymTide Guide

This year’s finalists had us checking off our to-do lists, checking out the tides, and checking on our gains at the gym.

Apple TV App of the Year Finalists

BugsnaxFitOnMUBI

Whether you’re kicking back with a good movie, kicking it up with cardio, or kicking some butt—our Apple TV finalists make it look amazing on the big screen.

Cultural Impact Finalists

BalanceEndlingFinding HannahHow to Say GoodbyePok PokProloquoRebel Girls, Too Good To GoUnpacking

By telling little known stories that deserve to be heard and helping us care for ourselves and loved ones, these apps and games improved the world for us all.

Mobile apps see a surge in consumer use and spending

Consumers spent $100 billion on mobile apps faster than ever this year and emerging markets saw a big increase in app use.

The mobile app market continues its rapid growth as consumers spend more time and money on apps than ever before, according to data.ai’s latest quarterly research. Consumers spent $100 billion on mobile apps faster than ever in 2023.

AI is here. In the third quarter, two of the top three breakout apps by download growth were AI-powered: ChatGPT and Remini, a photo editing app that uses AI to enhance photos. This trend is likely to continue as AI technology becomes more sophisticated and affordable.

Other standout areas of growth and top apps in the last quarter include:

  • Fitness apps: Strava, AllTrails, onX Hunt, and Runna.
  • Social apps: Instagram.
  • Video streaming apps: ReelShort.
  • Games: Monopoly GO.

Why we care. It might seem self-evident, but more and more consumers are using their smartphones to access the internet and interact with brands. If your brand doesn’t have a focus on mobile-first marketing, perhaps it should.

Downloads: Does the public want a better-managed version of X/Twitter? Threads, the microblogging social app launched by Meta at the start of the quarter, skyrocketed up the charts, reaching 150 million downloads faster than any other app in history. This was enough to propel it to the top spot by overall downloads in the quarter with 236 million, just ahead of TikTok’s 229 million downloads in the quarter.

However, it’s important to note that 80% of these downloads came in July, the first month of its launch. This suggests that Threads’ initial popularity was largely due to its reliance on Instagram’s large base of users to port over easily. In August and September, downloads declined to 25 million and 19.5 million, respectively.

Two other apps to pay attention to:

  • Temu: The shopping app continued its ascent in Q3. It climbed to the #3 spot after ranking as the #5 breakout app in the first half of this year. It was the top breakout app across European Union markets like France, Germany, Italy and Spain (as Threads is not yet available in the EU).
  • TikTok Music: Another app to keep an eye on is TikTok Music, which soft-launched in Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Australia and Singapore during Q3. It was the #10 breakout app in Brazil during the quarter.

Another notable trend is the increasing popularity of apps from and in emerging markets. In the third quarter, three of the six markets where consumers spend more than five hours per day in apps were in APAC: Indonesia (six hours!), Thailand and India. 

Constantine von Hoffman on October 17, 2023 at 3:40 pm

App Store Marketing Tools

Generate short links or embeddable code that lead to your App Store product page and display your app icon, a QR code, or an App Store badge. You can also create custom marketing assets — such as banners and images — and add preset messages in multiple languages to promote your apps in your advertising efforts.

View the tools

Providing safe app experiences for families

The App Store was created to be a safe and trusted place for users to get apps, and a great business opportunity for developers. Apple platforms and the apps you build have become important to many families, as children use our products and services to explore the digital world and communicate with family and friends. We hold apps for kids and those with user-generated content and interactions to the highest standards. To continue delivering safe experiences for families together, we wanted to remind you about the tools, resources, and requirements that are in place to help keep users safe in your app.

Made for Kids

If you have an app that’s intended for kids, we encourage you to use the Kids category, which is designed for families to discover age-appropriate content and apps that meet higher standards that protect children’s data and offer added safeguards for purchases and permissions (e.g., for Camera, Location, etc).

Learn more about building apps for Kids.

Parental controls

Your app’s age rating is integrated into our operating systems and works with parental control features, like Screen Time. Additionally, with Ask To Buy, when kids want to buy or download a new app or in-app purchase, they send a request to the family organizer. You can also use the Managed Settings framework to ensure the content in your app is appropriate for any content restrictions that may have been set by a parent. The Screen Time API is a powerful tool for parental control and productivity apps to help parents manage how children use their devices. Learn more about the tools we provide to support parents to help them know, and feel good about, what kids are doing on their devices.

Sensitive and inappropriate content

Apps with user-generated content and interactions must include a set of safeguards to protect users, including a method for filtering objectionable material from being posted to the app, a mechanism to report offensive content and support timely responses to concerns, and the ability to block abusive users. Apps containing ads must include a way for users to report inappropriate and age-inappropriate ads.

iOS 17, iPadOS 17, macOS Sonoma, and watchOS 10, introduce the ability to detect and alert users to nudity in images and videos before displaying them onscreen. The Sensitive Content Analysis framework uses on-device technology to detect sensitive content in your app. Tailor your app experience to handle detected sensitive content appropriately for users that have Communication Safety or Sensitive Content Warning enabled.

Supporting users

​Users have multiple ways to report issues with an app, like Report a Problem. Users can also communicate app feedback to other users and developers by writing reviews of their own; users can Report a Concern with other individual user reviews. You should closely monitor your user reviews to improve the safety of your app, and have the ability to address concerns directly. Additionally, if you believe another app presents a trust or safety concern, or is in violation of our guidelines, you can share details with Apple to investigate.

These user review tools are critical to informing the work we do to keep the App Store safe. Apple deploys a combination of machine learning, automation, and human review to monitor concerns related to abuse submitted via user reviews and Report a Problem. We monitor for topics of concern such as reports of fraud and scams, copycat violations, inappropriate content and advertising, privacy and safety concerns, objectionable content and child exploitation; and use techniques such as semi-supervised Correlation Explanation (CorEx) models, and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based large language models specifically trained to recognize these topics. Flagged topics are then surfaced to our App Review team, who investigate the app further and take action if violations of our guidelines are found.

We believe we have a shared mission with you as developers to create a safe and trusted experience for families, and look forward to continuing that important work. Here are some resources that you may find helpful:

Sensitive Content Analysis framework

Learn about Ratings, Reviews, and Responses

Report a Trust & Safety concern related to another app

Learn about the ScreenTime Framework

Learn about building apps for Kids

All you need to know from WWDC 2023

Here is everything you need to know from today’s WWDC Conference. A major push to #VR and the #Metaverse with Apple Vision Pro. Lots of news to review and digest.

App Analytics: peer group benchmarks

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. Peer group benchmarks provide powerful new insights across the customer journey, enabling you to identify what works well in your app and what can be improved. 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.

Getting Featured on the App Store

The App Store showcases great apps and games that impact the lives of people around the world, helping to shine a spotlight on developers doing incredible work. Apple’s always looking to highlight new apps, games, significant updates, in-app events, and great stories.

Overview

The App Store has a global team focused on helping users discover and engage with apps and games that fit their needs. Campaigns and programs are created to help, inform, and inspire users while also helping you drive downloads and redownloads. Apple worldwide team of editors curates selections on the App Store for each Apple platform in order to help your app or game get in front of the right users, in the right places, at the right times.

Apple highlight new apps and games as well as those with significant updates, special in-app events or exclusives, cultural or seasonal moments, and more. Apple also highlights unique stories — for example, a behind-the-scenes look at how a developer launched an app that changed an industry or supported their community, or a spotlight that shows how an app helped a user solve an uncommon problem.

Factors Apple considers

Apple looks for high-quality apps and games across all categories and business models. There is no paid placement or checklist of requirements. Selection is based on a variety of factors, all of which amount to a great product that all customers will love.

UI design. Great usability, appeal, and overall quality — such as beautiful visuals or intuitive gestures and controls.

User experience. Cohesive, efficient, and valuable functionality that’s helpful and easy to use.

Innovation. Solves a unique problem for users or takes advantage of new technologies to provide an optimal user experience.

Uniqueness. Stands out from the crowd, defines a new genre, or takes a fresh approach to a familiar category.

Accessibility. Well-integrated features that provide a great experience for a broad range of users.

Localization. High-quality and relevant localizations, including culturally appropriate content and support for multiple languages.

App Store product page. Compelling screenshots, app previews, and descriptions, as well as ratings and reviews.

Additional considerations for games:

  • Gameplay design
  • Art and animation
  • Controls
  • Story and characters (if applicable)
  • Replayability (if applicable)
  • Sound effects and music
  • Technical performance
  • Overall value

Share your story with Apple

Contact Apple

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