Apple Tightens App Store Rules to Block 'Nudify' Apps and Bait-and-Switch Tricks

Apple has rewritten its App Store Review Guidelines to explicitly ban "nudification" apps and to close a loophole that let developers slip harmful features past reviewers by hiding them until after an app was approved. The change, posted to Apple's developer newsroom over the weekend, is one of the company's most direct acknowledgments yet that AI image-generation tools have made it easier to produce nonconsensual explicit imagery of real people.

Closing the bait-and-switch loophole

Pornographic content has long been banned outright from the App Store, but Apple's App Store Review Guidelines now spell out that Guideline 1.2, governing user-generated content, explicitly covers nonconsensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated imagery, and requires any app hosting user content to let people filter objectionable material, report abuse and block abusive accounts. A second change, to Guideline 2.5.19, targets apps that misrepresent what they do during Apple's review process and then add undisclosed features, such as a nudify tool, once live on the App Store; Apple says that bait-and-switch tactic is grounds for removing both the app and terminating the developer's account.

Apple said its review process blocked more than 150,000 unsafe apps from reaching customers last year and terminated 193,000 developer accounts for fraud and abuse, framing Monday's guideline update as an extension of that existing enforcement, as reported by TechCrunch.

Pressure from regulators and watchdogs

The update follows months of outside pressure. In July, San Francisco's city attorney ordered Apple and Google to remove nudification apps from their respective stores, accusing both companies of profiting from app-store fees generated by the tools. A Tech Transparency Project report published the same day as Apple's guideline change found that safeguards on both the App Store and Google Play still do little to stop young teenagers from downloading nudify apps, even where the platforms technically prohibit them, underscoring that a rules change on paper doesn't guarantee enforcement in practice.

Apple did not say how many existing apps it expects the new language to remove. Developers will be expected to comply with the revised guidelines on new submissions immediately, with existing apps subject to the same standards at their next review. Google, which runs the comparably sized Play Store and was named in both the San Francisco order and the Tech Transparency Project's report, has not announced a parallel guideline change.