Heads Up, iOS Developers: A Lot Of You Are Flagrantly Breaking A Big NDA

Heads Up, iOS Developers: A Lot Of You Are Flagrantly Breaking A Big NDA

WWDC 2018 is coming to a close, but that hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm of developers, who continue to tweet, blog, and take to Reddit with the things they have noticed about the next version of iOS. There’s only one problem with that. It’s a violation of the agreement they signed with Apple to become developers in the first place.

Photo: Alex Cranz (Gizmodo)

Lurking in section 9 of the Apple Developer Program Licence Agreement is a new bit of text that expressly forbids developers from publishing screenshots from beta software (emphasis ours):

Further, Apple agrees that You will not be bound by the foregoing confidentiality terms with regard to technical information about pre-release Apple Software and Program Agreement Page 37 services disclosed by Apple at WWDC (Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference), except that You may not post screen shots of, write public reviews of, or redistribute any pre-release Apple Software, Apple Services or hardware.

Gizmodo was only alerted to the clause after this post was published with beta screenshots. Apple’s developer program licence agreement changes periodically and something like this clause, which forbids reviews or screenshots of beta products, can be in one version and disappear from the next.

So developers might have missed it, and have no idea they’re violating Apple’s agreement. Which could be nasty. In section 11.2(b) of the same agreement, Apple explictly notes that violators of section 9 can have their developer account immediately terminated.

So now might be a good time to scrub those tweets and save those fun gifs for somewhere else.


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