I'm trying to digest and understand the new set of APIs relating age verification that were released last week. I have say that without some cohesive overview, example app, just a simple diagram showing the relationship of everything, its not at all clear to me what's going on nor what an app developer is expected to do to use these apis (I'm a senior engineer with 15 year's iOS experience, but hey maybe I'm just a bit slow in the head).
I have a few questions, but the topic of this post is what is the relationship between age verification i.e. between the declared age range/significant change and Permission Kit?
The documentation for the former mentions the Significant Change API/Topic (https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=2ezb6jhj / https://developer.apple.com/documentation/PermissionKit/SignificantAppUpdateTopic).
Now the Significant Change Topic is documented as being part of PermissionKit, however the documentation for that (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/permissionkit)
States emphatically at the top:
"Communication experiences using the PermissionKit framework are only available using iMessage."
Meaning you can't use PermissionKit for anything other than iMessage? If it doesn't mean that, then why does it state so? If it does mean that, then how does an app which has nothing to do with iMessage make use of Significant Change - because this documentation:https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=2ezb6jhj
Is talking about using significant change for all apps, not iMessage.
So there is a contradiction here.