Apple updates its Style Guide with more inclusive language, such as replacing blacklist/whitelist with deny list/allow list and master branch with main branch
Apple has joined an industry trend toward more inclusive language in its technical domain, replacing terms with racial overtones like a …
CNETStephen Shankland
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's Style Guide change lands a month after protests sparked a broader movement to scrub racial overtones from everyday tech terms like whitelist/blacklist and master/slave across hard drives, camera flashes, and databases. The Linux kernel team approved equivalent terminology swaps days before Apple moved, so the two largest arbiters of developer convention — the kernel community and the world's most valuable platform owner — converged on the same vocabulary within a week.
First-order effects
Developers writing Apple-platform documentation and code now have deny list/allow list and main branch as house style, making those terms the de facto default in Xcode-adjacent projects, tutorials, and App Store submissions reviewed against the guide.
Second-order effects
With Apple and the Linux team aligned, tooling vendors, documentation platforms, and open-source projects face pressure to rename defaults or fork their terminology — the same cascade the June protest-era movement aimed at hard-drive and database vendors.
Third-order effects
Style guides function as quiet standard-setters: when a company with Apple's developer reach rewrites its reference docs, the terminology propagates through hiring tests, conference talks, and textbooks for years — though Apple's own trajectory is not linear, as its later AI-training guidance marked DEI itself a 'controversial' topic per the 2025 annotator guidelines memo, showing the language norm can be walked back under political pressure.
The trend: Technical vocabulary standardization is shifting from grassroots open-source proposals to top-down adoption by platform owners, whose style guides convert contested naming into default conventions.
More small but important steps forward - it's wonderful to see Apple taking action here: - Moving the default Swift branch to main: https://forums.swift.org/... - Updates to coding terminology across all their APIs: https://developer.apple.com/ ...
My own team started renaming things a few weeks ago as well. It may not move the dial a huge amount, but IMHO every little bit counts. https://developer.apple.com/ ...
👏👏👏 Apple's working to remove and replace non-inclusive language across their developer ecosystem. This includes Xcode, platform APIs, documentation, and more. https://developer.apple.com/ ... Apple Style Guide July 2020: https://help.apple.com/...
“Developer APIs with exclusionary terms will be deprecated as we introduce replacements across internal codebases [...] moving to terms such as allow list and deny list, and main as the default SCM branch in Xcode 12.” Nice work Apple! https://developer.apple.com/ ...
“Developer APIs with exclusionary terms will be deprecated as we introduce replacements across internal codebases, public APIs, and open source projects, such as WebKit and Swift.” https://developer.apple.com/ ...
Words matter. They're how we think and codify memories. This matters: “Updates to Coding Terminology” https://developer.apple.com/ ... “At Apple, we're working to remove and replace non-inclusive language across our developer ecosystem...” Updated Style Guide: https://help.apple.…
Apple has banished “blacklist,” “whitelist,” and “master branch” in push for inclusive language. It follows similar moves at Github, Twitter, and other parts of the tech world. https://www.cnet.com/...