Apple says that ~1M new apps and ~1M app updates were rejected in 2020, 470,000+ developer accounts were terminated over fraud concerns, and more
- Apple said it rejected almost 1 million apps that were submitted to its App Store for the first time in 2020.
CNBCKif Leswing
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple had already described removing apps for privacy-rule violations and deleting spam reviews in 2020; these figures extend that enforcement from individual listings to developer identities. The later first App Store Transparency Report made app rejections and government requests a recurring disclosure category.
The 2020 account terminations establish a baseline for Apple’s subsequent fraud reporting, including 428,000 developer accounts closed in 2022 and later disclosures of blocked transactions. The story matters because App Store enforcement reaches both the software submitted and the parties allowed to submit it.
First-order effects
Nearly 1 million proposed new apps and a similar number of updates did not reach the App Store in 2020, while more than 470,000 developer accounts lost access over fraud concerns.
Apple’s review operation becomes a more consequential gatekeeper for developers: rejection can stop a release, while termination removes the account through which apps and updates are distributed.
Second-order effects
Developers must treat account integrity and update review as operating requirements, not just product-release checks, because enforcement covers both submissions and publisher accounts.
Apple gains a stronger basis for presenting its App Store controls as anti-fraud infrastructure, a theme it later quantified through multi-year fraud-prevention reporting.
Third-order effects
The pattern points to App Store governance becoming a standing measurement and disclosure function, rather than an opaque moderation process limited to individual app decisions.
As platform enforcement increasingly spans app review, developer identity, and transaction fraud, control of the distribution channel becomes more central to Apple’s role in the mobile software market.
The trend: App-store operators are evolving from app curators into integrated trust-and-safety gatekeepers for software, developer accounts, and payments.
“Apple App Store stopped over $1.5 billion in suspect transactions in 2020” Political timing for this release. Everything is content moderation. Would be good to see prevalence data (what % of totals are these numbers?) https://www.apple.com/...
@marcoarment I even dipped my toe back in last year with my iOS word game. I was unsatisfied with the App Store. Apple claimed 30% of my effort and I don't know who my customers are unless they reached out. No thanks.
When you cut through the legal arguments, one of the key items the court will decide is whether IAP is an integrated feature of the App Store distribution mechanism (Apple's position) or a separate product that is tied (anticompetitively, in Epic's view) to store distribution. ht…
The only things I want to hear from Apple at WWDC: - You can use whatever payment system you'd like within your apps, and ours will compete on its merits. - You can disclose the App Store's rules to your users in your app. I don't expect either until a government forces them.
@marcoarment Since 2017, I've been figuring out ways to be happy and productive in my career without having Apple in my critical path. More people should try it.
If you were wondering how big the market is for bootleg Enterprise Certificate apps on iPhones: “And in just the last month, Apple blocked more than 3.2 million instances of apps distributed illicitly through the Apple Developer Enterprise Program.” https://www.cnbc.com/...
It's probably best for developer relations if as much time as possible passes between the Epic trial, in which Apple continues to shit all over developers and take credit for all of our work, and WWDC, in which they try to tell us how great we are and how much they value us. http…
Instead, what we keep hearing from Apple is “You owe us for your entire business, you should be thankful for everything we've done for you, we don't need you, we're doing you a favor by allowing you, and your apps add absolutely no value to our highly profitable hardware.”