Fraud attempts in the App Store: one in four app submissions rejected

The Apple App Store is a lucrative source of income for Apple and the developers. This also attracts criminals, against whom Apple is fighting back.

(Image: tre / Mac & i)

May 15, 2024 at 11:13 pm CEST

2 min. read

Mac & i

By

Malte Kirchner

This article was originally published in German and has been automatically translated.

For the fourth time, Apple has revealed the extent to which the company is fighting fraud in the App Store. Once again, the figures show the extent to which fraudsters try to harm users of Apple devices in various ways. According to the statistics, one in four app submissions had to be rejected. However, some figures show an improvement compared to 2022.

For example, the number of fraudulent developer accounts deleted by Apple fell from 428,000 in 2022 to 117,800 in 2023. Apple attributes the 73 percent decrease to improved measures to detect fraud attempts at an early stage. However, the number of prevented registrations of fraudulent developer accounts also fell: from 105,000 to 91,000.

Further key figures at a glance:

The App Review rejected 1.7 million submissions for the App Store in 2023 – the same number as the previous year. In total, the team reviewed almost 6.9 million app submissions in the year.
375,000 apps were rejected due to data protection violations (2022: 400,000)
248,000 were removed due to spam, copying other apps or misleading users (2022: 153,000)
In 38,000 cases, the app review removed apps after discovering hidden functions (2022: 29,000)
In 2023, 1.1 billion ratings and reviews were checked by Apple – 151.6 million were deleted (2022: 147 million)
3.5 million credit cards were blocked because they turned out to be stolen (2022: 3.9 million)
Apple prevented fraudulent transactions worth 1.8 billion US dollars in 2023 (2022: 2.09 billion US dollars) – in total, transactions worth 7 billion US dollars were prevented between 2020 and 2023

According to Apple, 500 employees monitor the security of the App Store in the App Review. They are supported in their work by "sophisticated tools" that can apparently detect cases of fraud. The team checks an average of 132,500 apps per week.