Apple enables sending ads in push notifications

9to5Mac, an Apple news portal, has discovered changes to the guide for publishing apps to the App Store. Now the company will allow sending ads in push notifications, provided that the user has expressed his consent by selecting the appropriate option in the settings.

This is the first time that traditionally tight restrictions on corporate push notifications have been officially relaxed. Up to this point, the use of push notifications for “advertising, promotions or marketing purposes” was prohibited. Now applications can send such push notifications, however, users must be given the opportunity to unsubscribe from promotional mailings in the settings of the applications themselves.

In all likelihood, the changes were caused by a public reaction to several incidents of violation of Apple’s own rules, when the corporation sent push notifications that looked like advertisements to users. Since third-party applications were blocked or removed for such actions, the violations were criticized and regarded as an abuse of the company’s rights.

Initially, Apple pursued the ban for a good purpose — to save users from advertising spam. However, his categoricalness raised questions and led to ambiguities. For example, should a sales push notification from a store app be considered spam? And what if the user does not mind receiving advertising pushes from specific applications? Some promotional notifications are useful — and now users will be able to receive them thanks to a change in the rules.

This isn’t the only change Apple has made in recent times. So, the company has set a deadline by which all applications in the AppStore must implement the ability to register via Apple ID — April 30 this year. This is supposed to be a safer alternative to the popular Facebook and Google registration methods.

Apple also said it will be more rigorous in weeding out dating apps — all low-quality, insecure, and non-unique dating apps will be removed. In addition, all applications that can “be used to commit crimes of any kind or contribute to the evasion of users from the rule of law” will be strictly banned.