It promised this change in September, 2021. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Apple is making good on its promise to let some developers link out to their own sites from within their apps, according to an announcement from the company on Wednesday. The new rules, which go into effect today, let developers of “reader apps” (apps that are primarily meant to provide access to digital content, like Netflix, Kindle, or Spotify) link out to their sites for things like account management or creation.
This should help improve the historically bad user experience for these types of apps caused by Apple’s previous rules. Previously, if you downloaded the Netflix app but didn’t have an account, Netflix wasn’t allowed to give you a link to sign up or tell you where you could go to create an account. That made apps frustrating…