Apple today informed developers that it is making new App Store marketing tools available for use, providing developers with a simple way to create short links, embeddable code with app icon and product page, QR codes, and more.
Take advantage of new marketing resources to promote your apps around the world. You can now generate short links or embeddable code that lead to your App Store product page and display your app icon, a QR code, or an App Store badge. Download localized App Store badges, your app icon, and more.
Developers can enter the URL for their app on the marketing page, with Apple then providing tools to generate the aforementioned links and badges. QR codes in particular may be of interest to developers as these can be used to quickly find an app with a scan with an iPhone camera, and QR codes are also used for the App Clips feature introduced in iOS 14.
QR codes can be generated with different colors and with each app's icon for a unique, personalized look that takes seconds to create.
Apple removed scam app Freecash from the App Store this week after the app spent months harvesting data from iPhone users, reports TechCrunch.
Freecash reached the number two spot on the U.S. App Store charts in January after being heavily marketed on TikTok. It promised users up to $35 per hour for watching TikTok content, but it was collecting swaths of user data. Back in January, Wired...
Wednesday April 15, 2026 7:10 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
Apple privately warned Elon Musk's xAI company in January that it would remove the Grok app from the App Store unless the company put a stop to the chatbot's nude and sexualized deepfakes, according to a letter Apple sent to U.S. senators and obtained by NBC News ($).
Earlier this year, Grok's AI capabilities came under scrutiny after X users shared nonconsensual sexualized images of women...
No, you aren't going crazy – Apple has quietly made a backend change to the App Store app in iOS that switches the location of the Updates tab and renames it to make it more prominent.
In the App Store app, you can see the change by tapping your profile picture in the top-right corner. The "Apps & Purchase History" tab used to be at the top the list, but it has switched places with...
Sure! At least 0.000001% of it, anyway. In any case, developers can use QR codes or not, it’s optional 🤷♂️
Re: the 15 or 30% revenue share, here’s a partial list of what it pays for:
a secure, customer-trusted payment system; app hosting; APIs, libraries, compilers and other development tools; testing, interface libraries; simulators; security features; developer services, including customer support; and cloud services, including 1 petabyte of CloudKit storage.
Those are some of the things Epic thinks Apple should provide for free 🙄
btw, it’s worth mentioning that more than 80% of all app downloads pay nothing. Not 30%, not 15%—0%. Apple gets $0.00. Not a single penny.
If everyone did what Epic did and Apple App Store revenue went to zero, Apple would replace the ~15 billion they received somewhere else. Like add another $75—the “Epic tax”—onto the price of iPhones. ($100 in a couple years, and it would keep going up every year).
But that way Epic and other devs could get 100% of the revenue instead of only 70 or 85%. Epic might reduce the price of dances and outfits, maybe not.
I’d love to see a progressive model, where for indie developers that are just getting started Apple takes a reduced cut (say 10%) until a certain paid volume is hit. IE 150 app sales or something. Gives newbs a chance to launch something and try to earn their first year Apple Developer fee back.
