Built-in intelligence ensures mobile apps meet major app store privacy guidelines
San Francisco, CA – WEBWIRE – Thursday, September 15, 2022
For businesses that are mobile-first or make the majority of their revenue through mobile app usage, any violations that could get the app removed or unapproved can have a significant impact on the company’s short-term revenue and long-term adoption,” said Chris Handman, Co-Founder and COO of TerraTrue.
TerraTrue, an innovator in privacy, today announced the availability of its Mobile App Smart Workflow that enables mobile app providers to proactively prepare for submission, quickly identify issues, and mitigate risks that could lead to delays in the privacy compliance approval process to be listed in the major app stores. TerraTrueÂ’s new privacy platform functionality also mitigates the risk of violating store guidelines that could result in getting mobile apps flagged for violations or ultimately being removed from app stores like the Apple App Store or the Google Play App Store.
Traditional shortcomings to app store compliance
App stores can be somewhat of a black box in terms of their approval processes. Even by reading all the documentation, mobile app providers can be constantly unsure if app stores will take issue with a particular app or new feature. Even understanding if theyÂ’re working against the correct checklist to get approved can cause delays in speccing, coding, and shipping apps.
Privacy is traditionally one of the last teams to get looped in for a review when a feature is updated and the mobile app is ready to be submitted for approval. That puts pressure on privacy teams to work quickly and inhibits the ability to provide better quality suggestions and a higher standard for their review in a timely fashion. This lack of privacyÂ’s early inclusion can lead to exactly the outcomes the business is trying to avoid, including being denied entry to the app store, delaying getting listed, or being removed.
To put into perspective just how many apps can be affected, Apple offered a number of statistics about its app rejection process in 2020:
- It rejected almost 1 million apps that were submitted for the first time
- It rejected almost 1 million app updates.
- 215,000 apps were removed because they collected too much user data or other privacy violations
“For businesses that are mobile-first or make the majority of their revenue through mobile app usage, any violations that could get the app removed or unapproved can have a significant impact on the company’s short-term revenue and long-term adoption,” said Chris Handman, Co-Founder and COO of TerraTrue. “By shifting left and providing visibility to privacy teams earlier in the pre-deployment phase, TerraTrue’s Mobile App Smart Workflow ensures they have ample time to review feature updates and provide feedback on any fixes that would be needed to comply with the app store privacy guidelines. Net, net, it’s a win-win for businesses to ship better apps faster, grow active users, and boost revenue sooner.”
With TerraTrue, program managers can leverage the TerraTrue Mobile App Smart Workflow out of the box to proactively inform privacy teams on what changes are being made to keep new mobile app or feature launches moving forward. Teams can also easily edit their own custom workflows with clicks not code. TerraTrue custom workflows work similar to Google Forms, but have the added ability to layer on risk scoring frameworks based on responses. TerraTrue custom workflows enable users to customize the set of questions and checklist items that are required for a data spec to be completed. TerraTrueÂ’s out-of-the-box questions are comprehensive and updated over time, but they can also be tailored to specific checklist items unique to each company. TerraTrueÂ’s solution can be easily tailored for iOS-specific or Android-specific concerns, and even other app stores like Amazon Appstore and Microsoft Store.
Key benefits of the TerraTrue Mobile App Smart Workflow:
- Speed up the mobile app approval process: TerraTrue saves time by ensuring mobile app updates are privacy compliant before submitting them to the app store
- Embed privacy earlier in the process: TerraTrueÂ’s pre-deployment approach gives privacy teams more time to provide meaningful feedback for privacy reviews
- Empower and protect mobile app businesses: In an ever-changing landscape, TerraTrue helps businesses keep an updated checklist to capture what they need to stay compliant, drive adoption and engagement, and increase time to value for new apps or features
Resources
Mobile App Smart Workflow product page (learn more)
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About TerraTrue
TerraTrue empowers teams to build privacy and security into everything they do through a collaborative, intuitive, and scalable platform. Purpose-built to work with modern product development, TerraTrue seamlessly captures structured data about how teams plan to collect, use, store, and share data. The platform then maps that digital blueprint to the world’s privacy laws to automate guidance, risk-flagging, and downstream data maps and reports. Sitting as a hub between product teams and review teams, TerraTrue also smartly routes rule-based workflows throughout an organization, automatically detects and reports infrastructure changes in cloud environments, and drives vendor management — all from the same single source of truth. Using TerraTrue, businesses run a scalable, fast pre-deployment privacy program that eliminates spreadsheets, manual ad-hoc processes, and compliance bottlenecks. TerraTrue was founded in 2018 by former Snap execs and is backed by, among others, 3L Capital, Anthos Capital, and Chris Sacca. Modern brands like Lyft, Robinhood, Roku, and Foursquare are shifting left to get privacy right with TerraTrue.