Apple to Updating Developer Ecosystem Language to Make it More Inclusive

Apple has announced it is going to update the terminology it uses within its developer ecosystem. It updated its style guide as part of this effort to make it more inclusive.

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Apple Update Style Guid

A news update on the developer website said:

At Apple, we’re working to remove and replace non-inclusive language across our developer ecosystem, including within Xcode, platform APIs, documentation, and open source projects. These changes began on June 22 with the beta software and developer documentation released at WWDC20 moving to terms such as allow list and deny list, and main as the default SCM branch in Xcode 12. An updated Apple Style Guide reflects these and other changes.

Furthermore, it said that  “Developer APIs with exclusionary terms will be deprecated as we introduce replacements across internal codebases, public APIs, and open source projects, such as WebKit and Swift.” The note added that developers were encouraged “to closely monitor deprecation warnings across your codebases and to proactively move to the latest APIs available in the platform SDKs.”

The updated style guide contains a number of changes. These include Apple TV+ and the instruction to not use the phrase whitelist’. Entries for ‘dock adapter’ and ‘Hold switch’ have been removed.

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