Guideline 1.2: safeguards needed for user-generated content
If users can create, generate, upload, share or otherwise contribute content, Guideline 1.2 requires four things together: a method for filtering objectionable content, a mechanism to report it, the ability to block abusive users, and published contact information so people can reach you.
Why it matters
These are cumulative. Having a report button without a way to block, or moderation without a contact route, does not satisfy the guideline, and this is the most common way apps fail it.
It applies more widely than people expect. Comments, profile photos, display names, shared playlists and chat all count, and since the October 16, 2026 revision so does content a user generates, with AI or otherwise: the guideline names social media, user-generated content platforms and AI content creation apps, and names nonconsensual intimate imagery among the harms the safeguards exist for.
Failing to put the safeguards in place, or to remediate violations after Apple has told you about them, may also be treated as a breach of the Developer Code of Conduct (Guideline 5.6), which reaches your developer account rather than one submission.
Reviewers test the mechanisms directly: they look for the report action on a piece of content and the block action on a user. A policy document describing moderation is not the same as a control in the interface.
The obligation is also an age-rating input: user-generated content is one of the capabilities the questionnaire asks about.
How to fix it
- Add a report action on every piece of user-generated content, reachable from where the content is displayed.
- Add a block action on users, and make blocking actually hide that user’s content.
- Put a filtering method in place for objectionable content, whether automated or a moderation queue.
- Publish contact information people can use to reach you about content, and make it findable.
- Describe all four in the review notes so the reviewer can find them.
The guidelines behind it
Read from Apple’s App Review Guidelines as last updated October 16, 2026.
What ReviewAhead checks
User-generated content safeguards. Guideline 1.2 requires filtering, reporting, blocking and published contact information.
- Asks whether users can create, generate, upload or share content, deriving the answer from the age rating declaration in App Store Connect when your account is linked, except that a declared "no" is not taken as the answer for an app that calls a third-party AI service, because the questionnaire asks about shared content and Guideline 1.2 also covers generated content.
- Asks about the four safeguards, because content filtering, reporting and blocking are app behaviour rather than App Store Connect metadata: nothing in the API records whether they exist.
- Derives "not applicable" when you have said the app has no user-generated content.
Apple’s own documentation for this requirement: developer.apple.com. Where this page and Apple disagree, Apple is right and this page is a bug.