Outline of changes to the iOS Developer Program License Agreement

Question

From time to time Apple updates their iOS Developer Program License Agreement, but, unfortunately, they never provide any clues as to what they changed since the previous version of the agreement. This means that after each change I need to read through the entire agreement and hope that I catch any of the new stuff they introduced.

Do you know of any place where a summary of the changes between versions of the agreement is presented (possibly somewhere on one of Apple's sites and I just missed it)?

An alternative might be an application that provides a visual difference between two PDF documents. I tried out DiffPDF, but it turned out that this app is not sophisticated enough to handle the accumulating changes after a few pages. If you have a different suggestion it would be welcome.

Answer 1

There is a very nice site that publicly calls out changes to Apple's developer terms.

• http://www.appstorereviewguidelineshistory.com

Before them, I've not seen anyone that provides these publicly, so I've resorted to saving the PDF to a folder every time I'm prompted that there is a change. I just append the YYYYmmDD of the agreement to the file name so I can see where exactly the agreement with Apple is changing.

From there, a tool like Kaleidoscope can run a graphical diff on the text if you copy it into a TextEdit document or otherwise get the content out of it's PDF container. Preview will allow you to copy all the text and paste it into a Text Edit document, but I also have a Folder Action created in Automator to convert any PDF file dropped into it's folder into a rich text file and dump the result on my Desktop.

Answer 2

The http://www.appstorereviewguidelineshistory.com is for review guidelines, not for the iOS Developer Program License Agreement

Try this: https://www.diffchecker.com/8cxz8j14

Answer 3

Usually the changes are minor and not worth mentioning. But when Apple does make significant changes, places like MacStories, 9to5Mac, MacRumors and Daring Fireball (amongst others) will feature them. Even the EFF has run articles on the Licensing Agreement in the past.

I'm not sure you really need to scour the contents for changes at each and every new update. Perhaps relying on the various news sources may be sufficient in this case as they tend to highlight only the important ones (or rather the most significant changes).

Answer 4

Export the PDFs to MS Word, then use Review/Compare to see the differences.