A pple has revealed that stringent security measures in place on the App Store thwarted more than $9 billion of fraudulent transactions over the last five years, with over $2 billion stopped in 2024 alone.
This discovery helps illustrate the success of Apple’s multi-layered security strategy for protecting our users and the App Store. The App Store connects 813 million visitors with 2.2 million apps in 175 regions.
The company’s annual analysis of App Store fraud sheds a light on the growing sophistication of bad actors, who use everything from trickster apps to phony schemes to defraud consumers. Apple fights these threats using a combination of automated systems and teams of expert human reviewers.
In 2024, Apple closed more than 146,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and turned away over 139,000 developer enrollment applications that it believes were fraudulent, effectively stopping many of these bad apps from even being published to the store.
Additionally, the business thwarted more than 711 million suspicious attempts to set up fake customer accounts and shut down almost 129 million bad accounts that were used to post fake ratings and reviews.
Apple’s diligence also applies to the app review process, in which it scrutinized more than 7.7 million it received in 2024. This process led to the elimination of over 1.9 million apps which did not meet Apple’s high standards of security, reliability, and quality for product development.
Among other things, over 37,000 apps were booted for being duplicitous (i.e., scammy), and more than 43,000 for basically being spam — in other words, they were “abandoned, having been created by developers who never submitted an update for review” or they were submitted with shady, secretive features that likely wouldn’t pass muster if Apple found out about them.
Fighting the manipulation of app discovery is also an important part of Apple’s security work. In 2024, the company processed more than 1.2 billion ratings and reviews, removing 143.5 million fraudulent submissions.
And 7,400 apps suspected of being fraudulent were denied placement on App Store charts, while 9,500 “coy” apps were blocked from search results, and all of that makes for a more equitable platform for developers who play by the rules.
Safeguarding user payments is critical, and Apple’s systems thwarted more than $2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2024.
The company found nearly 4.7 million stolen credit cards and permanently prevented over 1.6 million accounts from making a transaction. Security protection: enjoy safe transactions inside Apple Pay and StoreKit which has device-based encryption and authorization that maximize the protection of store owners.
Apple doesn’t just limit its monitoring to the App Store itself: The company says it actively works to prevent the spread of malware on the App Store and other unauthorized platforms, having blocked more than 10,000 illegitimate apps from entering the store via pirate storefronts in 2024 and prevented almost 4.6 million attempts to install apps from unapproved sources during the year.
These are part of Apple s continued work to provide a safe and secure experience for its App Store users, as well as a fair marketplace for software developers, it says. Though regulators like the European Union are pressing to open the iOS ecosystem to third-party app stores, Apple continues to make the security case for keeping its walled-garden approach.
Users are encouraged to stay cautious, and only download apps from the official App Store to avoid being scammed and infected with malware.