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Apple Publishes First-Ever App Store Transparency Report (macrumors.com)
29 points by alwillis on May 19, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments



Total number of apps on the App Store 1,783,232

Apps removed from the App Store 186,195

Of the apps removed, 149,378 were for "Design", the footnote indicating "This removal is the result of ongoing cleanup for outdated apps." (See https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=gi6npkmf for reference.) In contrast, very few (around 35,000) were removed for fraud, misconduct, spam, and copycatting.

It seems painfully clear from Apple's own transparency report that they're doing almost nothing to fight scams in the crApp Store. Every time I look, scams are all over the place, many of them existing for years. It sure seems like Apple only removes them when there's a news story in the media pointing out the scams.

Direct link to transparency report: https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/docs/2022-App-Sto...


>Every time I look, scams are all over the place

The best example of that is searching for chatGPT


That does sound pretty bad, especially from Apple that always talk about how safe their store is.


What is the correct ratio to determine if an App Store is safe?


You're not including apps rejected: 1,679,694

basically only 1 out of 2 apps submitted even make it in. there's a further breakdown of how many are rejected for what reasons.


> You're not including apps rejected: 1,679,694

1. That's submissions, not apps. Every update to every app has to be reviewed. If your update is rejected, your app still remains in the App Store.

2. When I said "fight scams in the crApp Store", I meant those already in the crApp Store. They obviously already made it through review.

> basically only 1 out of 2 apps submitted even make it in.

Where do you get 1 out of 2? According to the stats, 72% of submissions are approved on the first try (6,101,913 submissions reviewed). Of the submissions rejected, 15% (253,466) are approved after rejection. Overall, 77% of submissions are approved sooner or later.

Actually, those percentages probably aren't exactly right, because some rejected apps can have multiple submissions. We don't know the exact numbers there.

Here's some "napkin math". We know there were 4,422,219 approvals (6,101,913 submissions - 1,679,694 rejections). We know that 253,466 of those approvals were initial rejects. Thus, there were 4,168,753 first-try approvals. Let's assume for the sake of argument that each reject made 2 attempts on average. So out of 1,679,694 total rejections, there were 839,847 rejects. That gives a total of 839,847 + 4,168,753 = 5262066 candidate apps. Thus, under this assumption, the first try approval rate would be 84%? Someone correct me if I messed up something.


The confusion I have is that there are “only” 1.7 million apps. So comparing submissions and rejections to apps seems problematic. It seems like less than 10% of those 5.2 million apps actually made it into the store, assuming an app is there for 3-ish years.


An app submission is a specific version of an app: 1.0 or 2.0 or whatever number the developer gives it. As I said, "Every update to every app has to be reviewed." There can be 4,422,219 app submission approvals for only 1,783,232 apps in the store because many apps have multiple software updates per year. Some apps seem to update every week...


>There are 36,974,015 registered developers

Whoa. That seems like a heck of a lot. I wonder if this is active developers (those currently paying for an account as individuals or as part of a team).


You do not need to pay to be a developer. You pay to publish and to get beta access.


Okay, but how would Apple know how many developers are working behind the scenes without developer accounts? They've given a precise number, not an estimate.




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