In 2024, Apple stopped over $2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions and blocked nearly two million risky app submissions from reaching users. And in the last five years, the App Store has stopped more than $9 billion in fraudulent transactions.

The data has been released a few days before the company’s annual developer conference — WWDC — gets underway. With an average of more than 813 million visitors a week, the App Store is trusted by users around the world, in 175 regions globally.

Apple has provided details on how it has prevented billions in fraud. In 2024, Apple “terminated more than 146,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejected an additional 139,000 developer enrollments, preventing bad actors from submitting their apps to the App Store in the first place”.

The company rejected over 711 million customer account creations and deactivated nearly 129 million customer accounts last year, “blocking these risky and malicious accounts from carrying out nefarious activity”.

Last year, Apple detected and blocked over 10,000 illegitimate apps on pirate storefronts, which “include malware, pornography apps, gambling apps, and pirated versions of legitimate apps from the App Store”. The move has helped Apple protect developers from having their apps “cloned, altered, or weaponised for spreading malicious software”.

In fact, over the past month, Apple has also “stopped nearly 4.6 million attempts to install or launch apps distributed illicitly outside the App Store or approved third-party marketplaces”.

One of the trusted layers in the App Store is formed by the App Review team, which examines nearly 150,000 app submissions weekly, “with human reviewers and automated systems working together to catch potentially harmful software”. Apple has said that out of 7.7 million submissions reviewed in 2024, more than 1.9 million were rejected for failing to meet Apple’s security, reliability and user experience standards.

The App Review process is stringent, and in 2024, it removed more than 37,000 apps for fraudulent activity.

Common tactics used by fraudulent developers include concealing hidden features and functionality in their code. Such behaviour is monitored, and last year, it rejected over 43,000 app submissions for containing hidden or undocumented features.

App Review also takes action against a number of apps that attempt to trick or scam users, and in 2024, “rejected over 320,000 submissions that copied other apps, were found to be spam, or otherwise misled users”.

Action is also taken against apps that try to game the system and boost their ranking on the App Store, such as by using bots or paid services. Last year, Apple processed over 1.2 billion ratings and reviews and took action to combat fraud, removing more than 143 million fraudulent ratings and reviews from the App Store. In the same period, Apple also removed more than 7,400 apps from App Store charts and nearly 9,500 deceptive apps from appearing in App Store search results.