Last year, Apple shielded consumers on its App Store from more than $1.5 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions, preventing the attempted theft of their money, information, and time, as well as keeping nearly a million risky new apps out of their hands, according to the company.
Nearly 1 million problematic new apps, as well as nearly 1 million software updates, were rejected or removed in 2020 for a variety of reasons.
According to a statement released late Tuesday by Apple, about 95,000 apps were removed from the App Store in 2020 for fraudulent violations, the majority of which were bait-and-switch schemes.
Apple informed that “When such apps are discovered, they’re rejected or removed immediately from the store, and developers are notified of a 14-day appeals process before their accounts are permanently terminated,”
The Apple review team helped over 180,000 new developers launch applications in 2020.
More than 48,000 apps were rejected for having hidden or undocumented features, and more than 150,000 apps were rejected for malicious reasons such as spam, copycats, or misleading users in any way, such as tricking them into making a purchase.
Apple said “Another common reason apps are rejected is they simply ask for more user data than they need, or mishandle the data they do collect,”
About 215,000 apps were rejected by the App Review team in 2020 due to privacy violations. Apple agrees that privacy is a human right, and users prefer the App Store because of this pledge.
Apple admitted that “Even with these stringent review safeguards in place, with 1.8 million apps on the App Store, problems still surface,”
To help ensure accuracy and maintain trust, Apple said it relies on sophisticated system that incorporates machine learning, artificial intelligence, and human review by expert teams to moderate these ratings and reviews.
Over 1 billion ratings and 100 million reviews have been processed by Apple since 2020, with over 250 million ratings and reviews being deleted for not meeting moderation requirements.
Apple mentioned that “Unfortunately, sometimes developer accounts are created entirely for fraudulent purposes. If a developer violation is egregious or repeated, the offender is expelled from the Apple Developer Programme and their account terminated,”
In 2020, Apple terminated 470,000 developer accounts and refused another 205,000 developer enrollments due to fraud issues, effectively stopping these bad actors from ever submitting an app to the App Store.
Apple discovered and banned nearly 110,000 illegitimate apps on pirate storefronts in the last year.
“In just the last month, Apple blocked more than 3.2 million instances of apps distributed illicitly through the Apple Developer Enterprise Programme,” said the company.
Due to fraudulent and abusive behaviour, Apple deactivated 244 million customer accounts in 2020 alone. In addition, 424 million attempted account creations were denied due to trends that appeared to be fraudulent or abusive.