Bye bye white label apps
I listened to the last episode of Release Notes about the new App Store guidelines. There’s a new clause.
4.2.6 Apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service will be rejected.
App Store guidelines source
My first reaction was “finally!”. There’s too many clones in the App Store and it’s time to clean it up. So bravo Apple. But my thinking here is mostly based about clones of games.
Then I started thinking about businesses where a white label app might make sense:
- restaurants
- podcasts
- events
Apple’s message is quite clear: changing the splash screen and the icon of an app is not enough. But I think there’s still room to run a business. You can have a core that you reuse over and over, that includes data model, networking code, skeleton of view controllers. And then you can customize it for different cases, so that the app doesn’t “evidently look” white labeled.
Sure, you are gonna need to spend more time, and you won’t generate new apps by running a script anymore, but the result will be superior and contribute to a cleaner (and better) App Store.
On the opposite side, if I were running one of those businesses that sell templates for apps, I’d be definitely worried.