How often have you come across an app that had the word “FREE” or “ON SALE” in its name? We guess it helps to attract users since those terms will no doubt make users want to check it out, right? However it seems that Apple is no longer having any of that, according to the overview of the App Store product pages as discovered by VentureBeat.According to the overview, it reads, “Please remove any references to your app’s price from your app’s name, including any references to your app being free or discounted. If you would like to advertise changes to your app’s price, it would be appropriate to include this information in the app description. Changes to your app’s price can be made in the Pricing and Availability section of iTunes Connect.”
Apple has been making some changes to the way app prices are listed on its app store. For example back in 2014 Apple changed it so that freemium apps are no longer listed as free, and instead have a warning message to let users know that there are in-app purchases. With these changes, we can only imagine that Apple is trying to prevent some developers from potentially “tricking” users into thinking that their apps are free when in reality there are in-app purchases.
As we have seen in the past, children have accidentally racked up thousands of dollars in in-app purchases after mistakenly thinking that a game they downloaded was “free”. Apple has since confirmed these changes but declined to comment any further.