HACKER Q&A
📣 arthurcolle

Does Apple ban apps if they use private APIs?


I was looking at the recent OpenSwiftUI post and was curious about "unofficial APIs" and "private internal Apple APIs"

Does anyone have experience with this? Thanks Cocoa/Swift/macOS/iOS devs for any wisdom that you'd like to share

Seems like it's similar to using the Java internal APIs, but if they are available in the JVM I can use and ship them. The complication seems to stem from their audit process - if they find a usage in the app bundle they can just not allow the app on the App Store, so I'm curious how this works out in practice.

  👤 neximo64 Accepted Answer ✓
During the app store review process they'll find the use of the undocumented API and reject the submission.
👤 mikequinlan
>The complication seems to stem from their audit process

No, the complication stems from the license you agreed to in order to develop software for Apple devices.

https://developer.apple.com/support/terms/apple-developer-pr...

"Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Further, macOS Applications submitted to Apple for distribution on the App Store may use only Documented APIs included in the default installation of macOS, as bundled with Xcode and the Mac SDK, or as bundled with Swift Playgrounds; deprecated technologies (such as Java) may not be used."