Apple Developer News

The App Store is designed to make it easy to sell your digital goods and services globally, with support for 44 currencies across 175 storefronts.

From time to time, we may need to adjust prices or your proceeds due to changes in tax regulations or foreign exchange rates. These adjustments are made using publicly available exchange rate information from financial data providers to help make sure prices for apps and In-App Purchases stay consistent across all storefronts.

Tax updates as of October:

Your proceeds from the sale of eligible apps and In‑App Purchases have been increased in:

• Nepal: Apple no longer remits Nepal value-added tax (VAT) for local developers and proceeds were increased accordingly.
• Kazakhstan: Apple no longer remits Kazakstan VAT for local developers and proceeds were increased accordingly.
• Madeira: Decrease of the Madeira VAT rate from 5% to 4% for news publications, magazines and other periodicals, books, and audiobooks.

Exhibit B of the Paid Applications Agreement has been updated to indicate that Apple will not remit VAT in Nepal and Kazakhstan for local developers.

Learn more about your proceeds

View payments and proceeds

Download financial reports

Price updates as of December 2:

• Pricing for apps and In-App Purchases will be updated for the Japan and Türkiye storefronts if you haven’t selected one of these as the base for your app or In‑App Purchases.

If you’ve selected the Japan or Türkiye storefront as the base for your app or In-App Purchase, prices won’t change. On other storefronts, prices will be updated to maintain equalization with your chosen base price.

Prices won’t change in any region if your In‑App Purchase is an auto‑renewable subscription and won’t change on the storefronts where you manually manage prices instead of using the automated equalized prices.

The Pricing and Availability section of Apps has been updated in App Store Connect to display these upcoming price changes. As always, you can change the prices of your apps, In‑App Purchases, and auto‑renewable subscriptions at any time.

Learn more about managing your prices

View or edit upcoming price changes

Edit your app’s base country or region

Pricing and availability start times by country or region

Set a price for an In-App Purchase

Share your app or game’s upcoming content and enhancements for App Store featuring consideration with new Featuring Nominations in App Store Connect. Submit a nomination to tell our team about a new launch, in-app content, or added functionality. If you’re featured in select placements on the Today tab, you’ll also receive a notification via the App Store Connect app.

In addition, you can promote your app or game’s biggest moments — such as an app launch, new version, or select featuring placements on the App Store — with readymade marketing assets. Use the App Store Connect app to generate Apple-designed assets and share them to your social media channels. Include the provided link alongside your assets so people can easily download your app or game on the App Store.

Learn more about getting featured

Submit a Featuring Nomination

The Push Notifications Console now includes metrics for broadcast push notifications sent in the Apple Push Notification service (APNs) production environment. The console’s interface provides an aggregated view of the broadcast push notifications that are successfully accepted by APNs, the number of devices that receive them, and a snapshot of the maximum number of devices subscribed to your channels.

Set up broadcast push notifications

Broadcast updates to your Live Activities

Let’s get this out of the way: Yes, Devin Davies is an excellent cook. “I’m not, like, a professional or anything,” he says, in the way that people say they’re not good at something when they are.

But in addition to knowing his way around the kitchen, Davies is also a seasoned developer whose app Crouton, a Swift-built cooking aid, won him the 2024 Apple Design Award for Interaction.

Crouton is part recipe manager, part exceptionally organized kitchen assistant. For starters, the app collects recipes from wherever people find them — blogs, family cookbooks, scribbled scraps from the ’90s, wherever — and uses tasty ML models to import and organize them. “If you find something online, just hit the Share button to pull it into Crouton,” says the New Zealand-based developer. “If you find a recipe in an old book, just snap a picture to save it.”

And when it’s time to start cooking, Crouton reduces everything to the basics by displaying only the current step, ingredients, and measurements (including conversions). There’s no swiping around between apps to figure out how many fl oz are in a cup; no setting a timer in a different app. It’s all handled right in Crouton. “The key for me is: How quickly can I get you back to preparing the meal, rather than reading?” Davies says.

ADA FACT SHEET

• Winner: Interaction
• Available on: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Watch
• Team size: 1

Learn more about Crouton

Download Crouton from the App Store

Crouton is the classic case of a developer whipping up something he needed. As the de facto chef in the house, Davies had previously done his meal planning in the Notes app, which worked until, as he laughs, “it got a little out of hand.”

At the time, Davies was in his salad days as an iOS developer, so he figured he could build something that would save him a little time. (It’s in his blood: Davies’s father is a developer too.) "Programming was never my strong suit,” he says, “but once I started building something that solved a problem, I started thinking of programming as a means to an end, and that helped.”

Davies’s full-time job was his meal ticket, but he started teaching himself Swift on the side. Swift, he says, clicked a lot faster than the other languages he’d tried, especially as someone who was still developing a taste for programming. “It still took me a while to get my head into it,” he says, “but I found pretty early on that Swift worked the way I wanted a language to work. You can point Crouton at some text, import that text, and do something with it. The amount of steps you don’t have to think about is astounding.”

I found pretty early on that Swift worked the way I wanted a language to work.

Devin Davies, Crouton

Coding with Swift offered plenty of baked-in benefits. Davies leaned on platform conventions to make navigating Crouton familiar and easy. Lists and collection views took advantage of Camera APIs. VisionKit powered text recognition; a separate model organized imported ingredients by category.

“I could separate out a roughly chopped onion from a regular onion and then add the quantity using a Core ML model,” he says. “It’s amazing how someone like me can build a model to detect ingredients when I really have zero understanding of how it works.”

The app came together quickly: The first version was done in about six months, but Crouton simmered for a while before finding its audience. “My mom and I were the main active users for maybe a year,” Davies laughs. “But it’s really important to build something that you use yourself — especially when you’re an indie — so there’s motivation to carry on.”

Davies served up Crouton updates for a few years, and eventually the app gained more traction, culminating with its Apple Design Award for Interaction at WWDC24. That’s an appropriate category, Davies says, because he believes his approach to interaction is his app’s special sauce. “My skillset is figuring out how the pieces of an app fit together, and how you move through them from point A to B to C,” he says. “I spent a lot of time figuring out what to leave out rather than bring in.”

Davies hopes to use the coming months to explore spicing up Crouton with Apple Intelligence, Live Activities on Apple Watch, and translation APIs. (Though Crouton is his primary app, he’s also built an Apple Vision Pro app called Plate Smash, which is presumably very useful for cooking stress relief.)

But it’s important to him that any new features or upgrades pair nicely with the current Crouton. “I’m a big believer in starting out with core intentions and holding true to them,” he says. “I don’t think that the interface, over time, has to be completely different.”

My skillset is figuring out how the pieces of an app fit together, and how you move through them from point A to B to C.

Devin Davies, Crouton

Because it’s a kitchen assistant, Crouton is a very personal app. It’s in someone’s kitchen at mealtime, it’s helping people prepare means for their loved ones, it’s enabling them to expand their culinary reach. It makes a direct impact on a person’s day. That’s a lot of influence to have as an app developer — even when a recipe doesn’t quite pan out.

“Sometimes I’ll hear from people who discover a bug, or even a kind of misunderstanding, but they’re always very kind about it,” laughs Davies. “They’ll tell me, ‘Oh, I was baking a cake for my daughter’s birthday, and I put in way too much cream cheese and I ruined it. But, great app!’”

Meet the 2024 Apple Design Award winners

Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from finalists and winners of the Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.

In this edition: The Swift Pathway, new developer activities around the world, and an interview with the creator of recipe app Crouton.

Read the full article

As part of ongoing efforts to improve security and privacy on Apple platforms, the App Store receipt signing intermediate certificate is being updated to use the SHA-256 cryptographic algorithm. This certificate is used to sign App Store receipts, which are the proof of purchase for apps and In-App Purchases.

This update is being completed in multiple phases and some existing apps on the App Store may be impacted by the next update, depending on how they verify receipts.

Starting January 24, 2025, if your app performs on-device receipt validation and doesn't support a SHA-256 algorithm, your app will fail to validate the receipt. If your app prevents customers from accessing the app or premium content when receipt validation fails, your customers may lose access to their content.

If your app performs on-device receipt validation, update your app to support certificates that use the SHA-256 algorithm; alternatively, use the AppTransaction and Transaction APIs to verify App Store transactions.

For more details, view TN3138: Handling App Store receipt signing certificate change.