State & Local

Is Apple About to Accidentally Kill Government as Platform?

Medium.com: Is Apple About to Accidentally Kill Government as Platform? An effort by Apple to prevent spam may unintentionally undo years of digital government app development. At Code for America, we believe that government services can be as good as the best services you use on your phone every day. Today, most of the technology that makes those services available on your phone is built by third parties (non-profits, vendors, SaaS product providers) but the underlying services themselves (food assistance, pothole repair, garbage pickup, emergency response) are run and operated by government. The public not only deserves those services we have paid for with our tax dollars, and deserves them to be accessible in a digital era, but demands a clear relationship with their government regardless of who builds the apps. But earlier this year, Apple made an announcement that threatens to damage cities’ ability to serve and engage their citizens via smartphone apps. In an effort to reduce the proliferation of spam apps, Apple changed its App Store review guidelines to ban “apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service.” In what appears to be a misguided interpretation of an otherwise reasonable rule, Apple has decided to include white-labeled government apps in this category. In effect, if a company provides a unique 311 app for cities like Boston and San Francisco, Apple is now banning these apps and demanding that each company create a single app that serves all its clients.

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