App Store Adds App Suites and Cracks Down on Cruft

The most exciting news this week has been around Apple’s new software platform updates, with the company finally delivering on the new Siri while also introducing new child safety features, offering a healthy speed boost for older iPhones in iOS 27, and cleaning up its Liquid Glass mess from macOS 26 Tahoe.

However, as much as Apple likes to use its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote to show off its latest and greatest software features, it’s still first and foremost a conference for developers, which means there’s often a lot more going on than just a shiny new iOS release. In addition to lots of new features under the hood that will allow developers to improve their apps, Apple often uses the opportunity to tweak how developers sell and distribute their apps.

This year is no exception, with two new initiatives that promise to improve the App Store experience for users and developers alike.

New Subscription Bundles

The biggest announcement is that Apple is expanding its subscription options in an entirely new way. For the first time ever, developers will be able to team up and offer their customers a single subscription that applies to an entire suite of apps.

Apple outlined the changes in a newsroom announcement, noting that “new App Store Bundles will give developers the ability to partner together and offer users more for less.”

This could allow apps that already work well together to be sold as a single subscription, although the developers would still have to come to terms on exactly how this would work, and many app integrations are done by open APIs rather than partnerships. For example, I find that Fantastical and Todoist make such an excellent combo that I can’t imagine myself using one without the other, but the folks at Flexibits are simply using an API that anyone can plug into.

Apple adds that developers will also be able to create “Suites” to offer subscriptions that are solely available for groups of apps, not as single subscriptions.

It’s not yet clear how cross-developer bundles or Suites will work, as Apple has only said that more details will be available later this summer, likely in time for the public release of iOS 27.

Apple is also giving developers new tools to reach out to subscribers when they’re cancelling a subscription. These won’t get in the way of a user completing the cancellation, but it will allow developers to provide special offers that might encourage users to stay.

Evicting the Marketplace Cruft

In a subtler change discovered by the folks at MacRumors, Apple has also updated its App Store Review Guidelines to give it the right to pull low-quality apps off the App Store.

The App Store Review Guidelines have had a prohibition from nearly the start on saturating the App Store with low-effort “novelty” apps:

Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already. We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience. Spamming the store may lead to your removal from the Apple Developer Program.

Now, it’s expanded that section to add more categories of apps and make it much clearer what it plans to do about them, while clarifying that “spamming the store” simply means making “repeated submissions” of the same types of apps.

Don’t submit apps that are indistinguishable from what’s already widely available. Opportunistically creating variants of existing app categories or popular apps degrades App Store discovery, reduces overall app quality, and harms both users and developers. Certain kinds of apps, such as dating, flashlight, sound effects, wallpaper, simple timers, and fortune telling, are well established on the App Store and we will not accept new submissions unless they offer a meaningfully different or improved experience. We may remove these apps from the App Store going forward if they are not updated, improved, or do not attract customers. Other kinds of apps, such as drinking games, Kama Sutra, fart, and burp apps, are mediocre, low-quality, or low-effort and do not add value to the App Store. Repeated submissions of this kind may lead to removal from the Apple Developer Program.

You can read the full App Store Review Guidelines on Apple’s website.