Indicating premium content in screenshots / videos

Question

endecotp OP

Created Nov ’23

Replies 2

Boosts 0

Participants 1

Dear All,

I have a paid app which has in-app purchases to unlock additional content. In my App Store screenshots and preview videos, I used to indicate which content was paid and which was free with labels superimposed over the screen captures.

App store review guideline 2.3.2 supports doing this - in fact, it seems to require it:

2.3.2 If your app includes in-app purchases, make sure your app description, screenshots, and previews clearly indicate whether any featured items, levels, subscriptions, etc. require additional purchases.

But App Review don't like it. Some years ago they complained about the labels on the screenshots, which I removed. Now they are complaining about the preview videos. They cite guideline 2.3.7, which says (in part, my emphasis):

2.3.7 ... Metadata such as app names, subtitles, screenshots, and previews should not include prices, terms, or descriptions that are not specific to the metadata type. ...

So these guidelines seem to be contradictory. If I label a screenshot as "free" or "paid", they consider that to violate 2.3.7. (I'm not showing an actual "$1.23" price, just "free" or "paid".) But I need to indicate whether the content shown is "free" or "paid" in order to comply with 2.3.2. (And I want to label it as such, because I don't want users to misunderstand what is included with their initial purchase.)

Has anyone else had this problem? I wonder if there is some particular wording that they require, e.g. "Requires in-app purchase" rather than "Paid". Or something rather than "free". There is a limit to how much text I can legibly add without obscuring the actual content, so I have tried to keep it brief.

I did refer to 2.3.2 in my reply to App Review, but they haven't addressed that; they've accepted the update as a bug fix.

Ultimately I'll just do what they want - it always seems easiest - but I do have real concern that my customers are worse off without these annotations.

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Answer 1

endecotp OP

Dec ’23

I've asked App Review to comment:

There seems to be a conflict here between guideline 2.3.7 (screenshots and previews ... should not include prices) and guideline 2.3.2 (screenshots and previews clearly indicate ... require additional purchases).

My guess is that you specifically object to my use of the word "free" to indicate content that does not require in-app purchases. If this is the case, could you please suggest what alternative would be acceptable? I suspect that you would accept a verbose expression such as "no in-app purchase required for this content", but that is not practical in a screenshot or video. How about "not paid"? Or "included"?

Do please at least confirm that it is specifically the word "free" that I need to change.

Does anyone here have a suggestion for a synonym for "free" that App Review might not object to?

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Answer 2

endecotp OP

Dec ’23

I was not able to find any terminology that Apple would accept, so I have removed all the annotations from the videos. They have accepted this, despite it clearly not complying with the requirement to indicate where IAP is required (guideline 2.3.2), and being less informative for customers.

Interaction with App Review has been poor. My guess is that this has come up now because they have some new automatic analysis of preview videos that is able to read the text of captions. Based on keywords that it finds, it sends cut-and-paste rejections. Attempts to reply to the rejection messages just trigger further repetitions of the same generic messages, with absolutely no effort to address the core question, how can I comply with both 2.3.2 and 2.3.7 at the same time.

I did speak to someone on the phone. He was an actual human, and his feedback did seem at the time to be useful; he said that the specific issue was that I was not allowed to refer to a price, and "free" is a price, and that it would be OK if I used some other expression; I suggested "no in-app purchase required", which he seemed to agree was "not a price" and so would be OK. This was all reasonably friendly and seemed useful - except that it was wrong. I regenerated all the videos with different annotations based on this conversation and they were rejected again.

This is a long-established app that has made Apple hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission over the years; it annoys me that I get treated this way. I didn't generally support the idea of e.g. third-party app stores or side-loading since they could be used to distribute cracked versions of my apps, but having to wait three weeks to submit a bug fix (remember this was all caused by Xcode 15.0 creating apps that don't work on iOS 12 due to the borked linker) makes me more supportive of them.

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