The App Store started in 2008 and for the first time (except for jailbreaks) allowed apps to be installed on the iPhone. From the outset, it was only possible to publish apps in the App Store after being checked by Apple and allowing the group to participate in sales with 30 percent – Apple still does not allow alternative distribution channels to this day. This behavior is currently the subject of many antitrust lawsuits around the world – and it is uncertain how long this business model can continue. In the European Union, for example, Apple will soon have to tolerate alternative app stores on the iPhone.
Apple’s argument with antitrust authorities is that the controls carried out by the company make the App Store a safe way for customers to purchase apps. Apple has now published some data on the success of fraud prevention:
Weekly Visitors
According to Apple, the App Store is accessed by 650 million individuals every week and supports 195 payment methods as well as 44 different currencies. Apple currently has over 36 million registered app developers in the App Store. Curiously, most counts only come to just under 2 million apps currently offered in the App Store. This arguably means that the vast majority of developer accounts at Apple are not used to publish apps.
Retired Developer Accounts
If Apple discovers that developers have cheated during the review process or committed other serious violations of App Store rules, the developer account will be summarily suspended. Apple suspended a total of 428,000 developer accounts in 2022 and prevented a whopping 105 million attempts to open a fraudulent developer account. But the group has also blocked many user accounts: 282 million accounts were switched off by Apple in 2022. In most cases, these are probably accounts that were used to falsify reviews.
Over 100,000 submissions per week
Apple states that there will be an average of over 100,000 app and update submissions per week from developers in 2022. If you extrapolate this, this means over 5 million assessments per year. Apparently, however, only a small proportion of these submissions were objected to by Apple, because the group rejected 1.7 million. Of these, 400,000 are due to data breaches, 153,000 to spam and 29,000 to the use of private programming interfaces. Apple claims to have had over 20,000 calls to developers regarding rejects in 2022.
reviews
According to Apple, users gave over a billion reviews in the App Store in 2022 – and Apple blocked 147 million more. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t break down the reasons why reviews were disallowed or retrospectively removed here. Possible reasons are either purchased reviews to make your own app appear in a better light or offensive comments in the review text.
pay
Billions are traded in the App Store – and of course scammers try to use stolen credit card data. Apple claims it prevented the use of 3.9 million stolen credit cards. Apple also blocked 714,000 user accounts for fraudulent behavior when making payments. Overall, Apple claims to have fended off $2 billion in fraudulent transactions.
Still, many fraudulent apps
Unfortunately, Apple’s report is very one-sided, because the company doesn’t say a word about the fact that fraudulent apps keep appearing in the App Store despite the best efforts. A common scam used by scammers is to submit apps to the store and significantly change functionality after the review is complete. Here, a server sends different data to the app after the assessment has been completed, so that the behavior is completely different. Apple hardly has a chance to take action here if the company does not continuously monitor all programs in the App Store.