iOS: Privacy Manifes, deadline 1st May 2024

At WWDC23 Apple introduced new privacy manifests. With Privacy Manifests, app developers can provide more accurate descriptions of their app privacy practices.

Although the submission for the App Store review was successful, you may want to correct the following issues in your next submission for the App Store review. Once you’ve corrected the issues, upload a new binary to App Store Connect.

So how do you comply with this new privacy manifest?

You probably got an email that looks like this:

The email will have a list of all privacy-accessed API categories, those are the keys you need to note, like NSPrivacyAccessedAPICategoryFileTimestamp for example or maybe a few others as you can see in the email I received for my app pwdsafe – dpasswordmanager. Let’s see how this issue can be resolved.

Create a privacy manifest
You can also follow apples’ documentation.

Step 1: Xcode, chose File > New File
Step 2: Select App Privacy File type.

The following privacy file is an example of pwdsafe – dpasswordmanager, which can offer you an overview of the solution. I added Privacy Accessed API Types & Privacy Accessed API Reasons that were referenced in the email sent via App Store Connect.

Once the privacy file is created, open it either “Source Code” or “Property List” as shown in the following screenshots.

Privacy Property List
Privacy Source Code

To gain insight into the permissions required, you can access the provided link in the email sent through App Store Connect, reasons are structured as an array. Hence, if your app has multiple reasons for API usage, you can include more than one.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/privacy_manifest_files/describing_use_of_required_reason_api

I hope you find the post insightful.
Keep sharing!

Author: Danyal
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