The week of WWDC, Apple updated its App Review Guidelines to potentially pull underperforming apps from the store. Wallpaper apps, simple timers, and sound effects are explicitly named as categories at risk.
Apple is changing the terms of App Store residency. Under the App Review Guidelines Apple updated the week of June 9, 2026, alongside WWDC, the company is moving from rejecting weak apps at submission to potentially pulling them out of the store entirely if they stop "attracting customers." The bar is no longer a one-time gate. It is a standing compliance test.
The new language, as reported by TechCrunch, says Apple "may begin removing" apps that are not "updated, improved, or attracting customers" in certain well-established categories. The "may" matters. This is not a confirmed purge. It is an announced policy of conditional enforcement, and it applies only to categories Apple considers saturated. Apps that have not crossed Apple's threshold of usefulness can now lose the home they were admitted to.
The categories Apple has now flagged are specific. The updated text warns against opportunistically creating variants of existing app categories, and it newly enumerates wallpaper apps, simple timers, and sound effects apps as risks. TechCrunch's excerpt of the guideline text is truncated mid-sentence, and the full list of newly enumerated categories beyond those three is not yet on the public record. The earlier list of categories Apple has long rejected at submission, including fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, is not new. The new removal language sits on top of that list rather than replacing it.
A second lever sits behind the removal rule. The updated guidelines reserve the right to drop repeat submitters of "low-quality" apps from the Apple Developer Program entirely. A developer whose apps have been removed for failing the new bar, and who keeps trying to ship similar ones, can lose the right to ship on iOS at all. The policy is structured as a two-step escalation: first the app, then the developer account.
The reason the timing matters is the rest of WWDC. Apple is also shipping new discovery and merchandising tools this week. Removal and discovery are moving in the same direction at the same time. That combination tells developers something the wire copy alone doesn't: Apple is repositioning the App Store around curation it controls more directly, with both the negative end (kicking underperformers out) and the positive end (deciding which apps get surfaced) inside the same product cycle. Indie and small teams are the most exposed group on the negative end, because the "attracting customers" standard is a popularity bar applied by Apple, and small teams have the least margin to clear it.
The critique worth keeping is structural rather than moral. "Low-quality" and "attracting customers" are Apple's judgments, not neutral measurements. The guideline does not publish a downloads threshold, an active-user floor, a revenue cut-off, or a methodology for how App Review decides an app is no longer pulling its weight. A small studio whose niche app has a few thousand devoted users and steady updates is not, on its face, in violation of the policy's stated intent. Whether App Review treats it that way is the open question, and the appeal process, meaning what a developer can do when removal happens, how quickly, and to whom, is not described in the public guidelines either.
What to watch next: whether Apple names a threshold, a time window, or a category list it intends to enforce against first; whether the policy lands on large copycat operators or on small developers whose apps simply stopped trending; and whether the same week that brings new discovery features brings any published appeal mechanism for apps that receive a removal notice.