Brave web browser removes IAP to comply with App Store rules

Brave Banner (Image credit: Brave)

What you need to know

The Brave browser has removed its Brave Rewards feature to comply with App Store rules, the company has announced.

The Brave web browser has removed one of its features in an attempt to comply with App Store rules, the company has announced. Brave Rewards allowed users to earn money for seeing ads and then give it to content creators, but Apple said that it contravened various App Store rules.

The feature has now been removed so the Brave app as a whole can remain on the App Store.

Today Brave is releasing a new version (1.22) of its iOS browser in order to comply with recent stipulations made by Apple. In a nutshell, Brave users on iPhones and iPads will no longer be able to earn rewards for their attention, and will no longer be able to tip their favorite online creators via Brave. These changes to our Brave Rewards system do not apply to our desktop and Android browsers.

The announcement blog post goes on to explain exactly which rules Apple has complained about, specifically guidelines 3.1.1 and 3.2.2. If Brave wasn't updated to comply, it wouldn't be allowed in the store.

Around the iOS 14 release, Apple raised some concerns about our iOS app and deemed that Brave Rewards was not compliant with their guidelines 3.1.1 and 3.2.2, and required immediate remedies. Brave Rewards is built on the Basic Attention Token (BAT) and is a new way to value attention, connecting users, content creators, and advertisers. Users are rewarded in BAT with 70% of the ad revenue share of the privacy-preserving ads they opt into viewing, and they can support content creators they love by rewarding them with BAT. There are currently over 985,000 Brave verified content creators.

The company says that any iOS users who already accumulated Brave Rewards will be able to transfer them to the desktop browser in a future update. You can learn more about the goings-on over on the Brave website.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.