The End of White-Label Apps?

Over the last years, Apps became one of the most important new channels for insurance companies. They open the door to a mobile-focused customer experience and to be a bigger part of their customers life. But doing “just” an app is not enough anymore. As of March 2017, Apple users were able to choose between 2.2 million available apps. To be found easier, a lot of insurance companies focused on publishing several apps; each focusing on another functionality.

A lot of these app were setup by using established apps and creating a white-label version for the insurance company. But this will come to a sudden end in the next months…

Changes at WWDC

Following Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple changed its App Store review guidelines to ban “apps created from a commercialised template or app generation service”. So in other words: It will be much harder to use a White Label app.

Apple’s App Store guideline changes are being pushed from the highest levels at Apple and this change will impact many verticals and industries.

However, the White label app model will still be allowed for internal enterprise distribution use cases.

Think about App Strategy

Insurance companies should use this change as a signal to check their own apps. Even if their apps are not directly influenced by this change, this can be seen as an indicator for the moving trend to have one central app — a single, secure app that contains all the digital services of a company. This leads to a simpler app discovery, higher adoption / engagement, the opportunity to efficiently roll out feature updates (or security patches), and the chance to deliver more value to the customer.

More information on the change for apps can be found here:

http://www.appstorereviewguidelineshistory.com/articles/2017-06-08-new-rules-following-wwdc-2017/