Apple to Remove Non-Inclusive Terms Across Developer Ecosystem

Apple is working towards removing non-inclusive language from its developer ecosystem. Following an industry-wide shift, Apple is committing itself to make the appropriate changes.

In a blog post on the developer portal, Apple announced that the company will be changing and removing non-inclusive terms across its developer ecosystem including Xcode, platform APIs, documentation, and open source projects.

“These changes began on June 22 with the beta software and developer documentation released at WWDC20,” Apple said in the post. An example of one of the changes made is the removal of terms such as “whitelist” and “blacklist”. In an updated Apple Style Guide, it shows that those terms have been replaced by “allow list” and “deny list”. This was done in an effort to avoid possible negative and discriminatory connotations, despite having been commonly used phrases in the past.

There’s an industry-wide shift in the works where multiple technology giants are removing similar non-inclusive terms from its codebase. Google has announced a similar initiative, replacing whitelist and blacklist with “allowlist” and “blocklist”. Google is also committed to transitioning to gender-neutral terminology, suggesting that code avoids the use of “he, she, him, her, his, hers, etc.”

Linux has been taking similar steps as well. To replace symbol names such as “slave” within its code, Linux has suggested terms such as “secondary, subordinate, replica, responder, follower, proxy, or performer.