The App Store’s $2.2 Billion Line in the Sand
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In advance of its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) next month, Apple has shared an update highlighting the heavy work of policing the App Store against fraud and malware, noting that it stopped over $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2025 alone.
Although these announcements, which appear to be turning into an annual tradition, have a certain marketing advantage in how they show the value of the App Store over alternative app marketplaces, they also provide useful insight into just how busy the App Store is — and why it’s an uphill battle for Apple.
While $2.2 billion is undoubtedly an unbelievable amount of money on its own, Apple puts some context on this number by explaining just how many “problematic” app submissions it has to deal with: two million rejections in the last calendar year alone.
In 2025, Apple prevented over $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions, adding to a total of more than $11.2 billion over the past six years. Apple also took a number of actions to block bad actors from distributing malicious software, rejecting over 2 million problematic app submissions last year alone.
Apple
That works out to nearly 5,500 rejected apps per day, and it’s not just the apps. Apple also adds that it terminated 193,000 developer accounts last year over fraud concerns, while also rejecting more than 138,000 who tried to sign up as “new” developers.
While Apple clearly doesn’t catch every scammy app — and some have even accused the company of profiting by letting these slip through — the reality is far more complicated. In 2021, researchers identified 134 “fleeceware” apps on the App Store. That’s still too many, especially considering they reportedly bilked users out of $365 million, but if Apple is truly blocking millions of these apps each year, that makes the few that slip through little more than a statistical rounding error — literally less than a hundredth of a percent of the apps the company actually does catch.
Apple isn’t just policing developers and apps on its own storefront. It also reports that it rejected 1.1 billion fraudulent customer account creations and shut down 40.4 million customer accounts last year for fraud and abuse.
These are staggering numbers that go to show how prolific modern fraud and crime rings have become — this breaks down to an average of 3 million fraudulent accounts being created every day, or 34 every second.
Apple also notes that it detected and blocked 28,000 illegitimate apps on pirate storefronts, including copycat and pirated versions of legitimate App Store apps along with porn and gambling apps, likely created by abusing Apple’s Developer Enterprise Program, which is intended to allow companies to distribute iPhone and iPad apps to their own employees.
This is where Apple’s ironclad control of the iPhone and iPad app ecosystem remains a double-edged sword. While the company has been forced to open things up to alternative app marketplaces in the European Union and Japan, it hasn’t completely opened the floodgates. Apps must still be “notarized” by Apple before they can run on one of the company’s devices, and while the company has promised not to play nanny with content, it still reserves the right to refuse to sign off on apps that contain malware, involve fraud, contain hidden or misleading features, or flagrantly violate local laws.
While we can’t imagine any legitimate app marketplace would want to host malware, there are a lot of other grey areas here that not everyone is happy about. Still, it’s hard to argue with Apple’s results — and it’s also kind of scary to imagine what the App Store would be like if those two million “problematic” apps had been allowed to run free.
