"PrivacyManifestChecker: The App Store Rejection You Can Catch at Commit Time"

A missing or malformed PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy is an automatic App Store rejection — discovered at submission, mid-release-crunch, unless you move the check left.

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Apple requires a privacy manifest in app bundles, and (post-2024) apps using required-reason APIs must declare a reason. Get it wrong and the feedback arrives at the worst possible moment: you submit, you wait, and the build bounces. privacy-manifest moves that discovery to commit time.

Opt-in by detection — the whole design

The hardest part of this checker isn’t validating a plist; it’s not firing on the wrong project. A pure SPM library has no App Store obligation, and flagging a library for a manifest it never needs would train people to disable the checker. So it’s opt-in by detection: it does nothing unless it positively identifies an app target — an Info.plist with CFBundleExecutable plus a launch/scene manifest, an .xcodeproj declaring an application product type, or an explicit appTargets config entry.

The risk is deliberately biased toward under-flagging: a missed app manifest is still caught by Apple; a nagged library erodes trust in the whole gate. When there’s genuine doubt, it stays quiet.

What it checks, when it acts

missing PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy  → error   (an app with no manifest)
unparseable manifest           → error
missing a top-level key        → warning (NSPrivacyTracking, …CollectedDataTypes, …)

File scans skip hidden trees (.build, .git) so a vendored Info.plist can’t misfire the app detection. On this repo — a CLI tool, not an app — it correctly reports SKIPPED.

A compliance control too

privacy-manifest is one of the technical-control checkers in the compliance mapping, tied to the SOC 2 privacy-notice criterion (P1.1) — a privacy manifest is, after all, a machine-readable notice of what data an app collects. It’s a good example of a checker that catches a concrete shipping failure and produces evidence for a control, from the same AST-and-plist walk.

Try it

quality-gate --check privacy-manifest

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Source: github.com/jpurnell/quality-gate-swift