Apple has taken an unusual approach to teaching developers about how the App Store reviews submissions, by creating a digital comic book. App Review Guidelines, created by Apple and comic book reader app developer
Madefire, is a free to download 35-page comic that mixes together the important rules that developers must follow when submitting apps with comic book visuals, to try and make the
extensive rules easier for developers to digest.
The
comic book splits the guidelines into five sections, covering Safety, Performance, Business, Design, and Legal guidelines. Each section features its own unique wordless story told through background illustrations that appear throughout the chapter, but have little to do with the section's title. Since the stories are understandable from illustrations alone, all of the speech bubbles and areas where text appears in each chapter contain the guidelines themselves.
The addition of a comic book version of the App Store review guidelines is a new way for Apple to explain the rules developers must abide by in order to get their apps accepted for sale and distribution. Considering some app developers are children, with the youngest WWDC 2016 attendee aged nine years old, it is likely the main guidelines text is too intimidating to read by some people, making a comic book version a slightly more attractive way of providing the same information to those who would otherwise avoid it.
The five chapters were drawn by artists Mark Simmons, Iie Wolf, Luján Fernández, Shari Chankhamma, Ben Jelter, and Malcolm Johnson, with the cover art created by Dailen Ogden.