Guideline 1.2 User-Generated Content, in plain English
“A mechanism to report offensive content and timely responses to concerns”
Guideline 1.2 covers any app where people create, upload or share content others can see: social apps, communities, chats, reviews and AI content creation apps. Apple requires four safeguards: a way to filter objectionable material before it's posted, a way to report offensive content with a timely response, a way to block abusive users, and published contact information. An app that lets people post to each other without them is turned down.
Checked against Apple’s guidelines on (Apple’s version of ). Apple’s reviewers make the final call.
What Guideline 1.2 means
Apple names the risks it wants handled: intellectual property infringement, nonconsensual intimate imagery and anonymous bullying. The guideline now names AI content creation apps alongside social media, so an app where people generate images or text and share them is in scope too.
You are responsible for removing content that breaks the guideline, your terms or your community standards. Apple says that if it finds such content it will ask you to remove it and to plan how you'll comply better, may remove the app until you do, and treats egregious or repeated cases as grounds for removal from the App Store and the Apple Developer Program.
Some kinds of app don't belong on the App Store at all, according to Apple: services used mainly for pornography, Chatroulette-style or random anonymous chat, "hot-or-not" voting on real people, threats or bullying. An app that shows content from a web service may display incidental mature content only if it's hidden by default and turned on by the user on your website.
Guideline 1.2.1 adds rules for creator content: apps built around content from a community of creators must moderate it like other user content, and must let people identify content above the app's age rating and restrict it by verified or declared age.
Why apps are turned down under Guideline 1.2
People can't report content or block other users
Posts, comments or messages from other people appear with no Report option on them and no way to block their author, or blocking exists but there's no list to undo it.
There's no way to filter objectionable content
Anything typed goes straight onto everyone's screen with no check on the way in, so the app has no filtering method, the first of Apple's four safeguards.
The app has no published contact information
Neither the app nor its support page tells people how to reach the developer, which Apple requires so problems can be reported.
Reported content isn't dealt with
Reports go nowhere, or the terms don't say what's forbidden, so Apple can't see a timely response to concerns.
How to fix it and resubmit
- Find every place where one person's content is seen by another: posts, comments, chats, profiles, reviews, shared AI creations.
- Add a Report option to each of those items and a Block option for its author, and hide what someone reported, and everyone they blocked, from them straight away.
- Add a list of blocked people where they can be unblocked, and a check that filters objectionable text before it's posted.
- Publish Terms of Use that forbid objectionable content and abusive users, and a support page with a way to reach you, and link both from inside the app.
- Decide who reads reports and how quickly, write that in the review notes with where Report and Block are, then resubmit.
How Borel helps
Borel's submit gate checks Guideline 1.2 against the app's own database: if its read rules let people see each other's posts, comments or messages and the app has no Report and Block, Borel won't send it to Apple and says in a plain sentence what to add. If Borel can't read the database at that moment, it asks you to try again rather than guessing.
The moderation kit Borel writes into apps offers Report and Block on each item someone else wrote, a blocked people list for settings, a check on text before it's posted, and hiding of reported items and blocked people for that person on every device they sign in on. Each report goes to you as the app's owner.
Apps with user content get Terms of Use, hosted by Borel, with a no-tolerance rule for objectionable content and abusive users, and a hosted Support page. The review notes Borel drafts tell the reviewer where Report and Block are, that reported content is hidden for the reporter at once and reviewed by the developer within 24 hours, and that the terms forbid abuse.
Questions people ask
Does Guideline 1.2 apply to a chat or comments feature?
Yes. It applies to any app that lets people create, upload or share content that others see, so a chat, a comments section, shared profiles or public reviews all bring the four safeguards with them.
Does it apply to AI-generated content?
Apple's guideline names AI content creation apps alongside social media and user-generated content platforms. If people generate content in your app and share it with others, plan for filtering, reporting, blocking and contact details.
How fast do I have to act on reports?
Apple asks for timely responses to concerns without naming a number. Many developers commit to a time in their terms and review notes; whatever you promise, keep to it.
Is a private notes or journal app covered by 1.2?
Not if only the person who wrote something can ever see it. The guideline is about content shared with or visible to other people.
Related guidelines
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