How should I answer App Review questions about the Kids Category?

For what it’s worth, I tried to use information provided in the docs for Apple App Privacy to reply in the following way and was rejected again.

• Does your app include third-party analytics? If so, please provide details about what data is collected for this purpose.

Yes, our app includes third-party analytics. 

Specifically, we use RevenueCat for auto-renewing subscription support. RevenueCat tracks purchase history to provide us information about customer purchase history, the overall state of our subscription business, and results of any pricing experiments we may run.

We take advantage of RevenueCat’s anonymous customer ID feature, so we do not have a way to identify individual users.

• Does your app include third-party advertising? If so, please provide a link to the ad network's publicly-documented practices and policies for kids apps.

No, our app does not include third-party advertising.

• Will the data be shared with any third parties? If so, for what purposes and where will this information be stored?

I assume this question is related to third-party advertising, in which case it does not apply since we do not include third-party advertising.

More broadly, aside from the subscription support provided by RevenueCat, no other data from our app is shared with third parties.

• Is your app collecting any user or device data for purposes beyond third-party analytics or third-party advertising? If so, please provide a complete and clear explanation of all planned uses of this data.

No, our app is not collecting any user or device data for purposes beyond third-party analytics or third-party advertising.

I was rejected with the following request:

Guideline 1.3 - Safety - Kids Category

We noticed that your Kids Category app includes analytics, advertising and collects, transmits, or has the ability to share personal information or device information with third parties. Specifically: 

- Your app includes third-party analytics or third-party advertising with the ability to collect, transmit or share identifiable information, including, for example, purchase history. 

Next Steps

To resolve this issue, please remove this functionality or revise your app so that no personally identifiable information or device information is sent to third parties.

Assuming that RevenueCat is indeed a suitable solution for subscription services in kids apps, I feel like I’m missing the right way to describe how RC is compliant, which is frustrating.

Hi @cody, thanks for the reply.

if that were the case, I’m not sure how any in-app purchase validation could occur with kids apps.

It felt to me that the crux of the issue is that RC is a third-party and had access to the purchase history. If we were processing that ourselves or relying solely on Apple’s StoreKit 2 features, I don’t imagine there would be a problem. 

Is there anything about how I answered the questions that you would say misrepresents how RevenueCat works?

Or asked another way, since these appear to be boilerplate questions from App Review, does RC have a set of stock answers we can use when asked to represent how RC would qualify for the “In limited cases” clause of section 1.3? It’d be great to have official support documents from RC to send to App Review if asked for details of how kids’ privacy is protected.

Sadly, I don’t have any good advice or suggestions to share. I prioritized a content update release and temporarily gave up trying to get our existing app into the Kids Category. I’ve been meaning to try again while still using RevenueCat, but your experience isn’t very encouraging.

FWIW, the RevenueCat team wrote what seems like a pretty comprehensive blog post about how to use StoreKit 2 instead of RC in case you need to go another path.

@nathan-acb462 If you find a way to make it through, please share! 

RC team: if you have any channels into Apple and can get some advice for us on how to navigate this, that’d be great too! 😄