Writing about Apple without breaking Apple’s rules

When Apple announced HomeView, the ask was clear: tell visitors AHA works with Apple, and make the site feel Apple-ish. Both are easy to get wrong. Apple’s trademark rules are specific, and every claim has to be literally true.

What we could actually say

Before a line was written, every claim was checked against AHA’s fact files:

• Compatible with Apple Home: verified, and already on 13 pages.
• Matter and Thread certified, AirPlay on the room speakers: verified.
• “Works perfectly with Apple”: not usable. Apple’s guidelines forbid exaggerating the Apple message, and “perfectly” is a promise no product page should make; voice control, for one, needs the internet.

Siri, the Home app and an iPhone app sat behind five questions, and nothing about them was published until the answers were in the knowledge base. Three were answered on 16 October: every AHA product shows up in Apple Home and is set up there on every install, Siri can control them, and there’s an AHA app for iPhone. The other two, a public listing for AHA’s Matter certification and a licence for Apple’s Home icon, are still open, so the badge and the icon stay off the site.

Apple’s rules, written as house rules

From Apple’s third-party trademark guidelines and its Works with Apple Home page:

• Referential phrases only: “works with”, “compatible with”.
• Never possessive or plural in site copy, and never “the Apple Home”.
• AHA leads. Apple may appear in a title or H1 only as “compatible with Apple Home”, after AHA’s name.
• No Apple logo or icon without a written licence.
• A trademark credit wherever the marks appear.
• The official badge needs Matter certification and Apple’s licence, and never goes on company pages.

Encoded, not remembered

Rules in a document get forgotten, so we built them, with Claude Code, into the files the templates read:

• trademarks.js holds one credit line naming only the Apple marks the site actually uses. The footer prints it on all 91 main-site pages, and the landing-page template adds it whenever a section names an Apple product, so an editor can’t drop it.
• appleHome.js holds badge approvals, and it’s empty:

// Empty until Apple approves a product.
// The badge template renders nothing without an entry,
// and we never draw our own badge.
module.exports = { badges: {} };

• A wording check looks for possessives, plurals, “the Apple Home”, “Apple partner” and “Apple-certified”. It came back clean on every Apple page we shipped.

Borrow the restraint, not the brand

The new look took Apple’s structure: the type scale, generous spacing, borderless tiles, chevron links. On iPhone, iPad and Mac the body font is the device’s own SF Pro, through the system font stack, so there’s no download and no swap. Android and Windows keep Inter. It’s the device’s font, not an embedded Apple one.

The first previews also took Apple’s greys, and the site looked dull. I asked for AHA gold everywhere. Contrast improved rather than suffered: small gold text measures 5.0:1 on its band and secondary text 5.6:1, where the old grey managed 4.3:1 and fell short of AA. Plain AHA gold is only 2.3:1 on white, so it’s kept for fills and rules, never text. A page joins the look with two front-matter lines, and rollback is deleting them.

The pages

On 16 October an Apple Home landing page went up, titled “AHA Home Automation Compatible With Apple Home”, with AHA first. Five articles sit around it, from HomeView in India to the core question, “Does AHA work with Apple Home?”. Google crawled all six on 15 and 16 October and had them indexed within days, with no indexing requests needed.

The HomeView copy followed the same rules: every line checked against the fact files before it went in. The Siri cards say “Lock”, never “Unlock”, because Siri asks for authentication to unlock. HomeView sections for the landing page and a HomeView card for the homepage are built and going live, alongside an AI-generated hero: a Mumbai living room at dusk with HomeView among AHA’s own labelled products, recomposed at 9:16 for phones, with no Apple logo.

Rules I’d pass on

1. Read the rules before writing the copy. Apple publishes them.
2. Put rules where templates read them. A credit line in a data file can’t be forgotten.
3. Gate claims on recorded answers, not on what sounds right.
4. Borrow restraint, not branding. Gold, not grey.
5. Leave the badge slot empty until Apple fills it.