Never as in recent years App Store represents one of the most important pieces of Apple’s strategy. With the smartphone market suffering a general crisis, the world of services and apps becomes increasingly central to monetize on a well-established user base and the App Store is right at the center of their distribution, which is why Apple strenuously protects the role of its digital store within the iOS / iPadOS ecosystem.

This has led to several criticisms of the Cupertino house, very often accused of having established a monopoly within iOS and iPadOS which sees the App Store as the only access point to applications and services, causing the discontent of those who would not want to comply with the strict rules dictated by the Californian company. These cover a wide variety of aspects of app marketing, from need to need to share a good portion of the revenues with Cupertino (see the Fortnite case), the limits imposed on the contents of the applications themselves and so on, as also underlined by the dispute with Cydia.

Apple, for its part, responds to these accusations by emphasizing how much the App Store – and the policies related to it – are essential to ensure that iOS and iPadOS are safe environments for the user, in which it is possible to carry out operations with sensitive data without the fear that an app could act fraudulently. Of course, even the App Store is not totally exempt from phishing attempts or scam applications, however the range is certainly less than in a less controlled environment.

This is also one of the points that Apple tries to highlight in its last report which is just meant to look back at 2021 and see how the App Store represented a benefit for the whole iOS ecosystem. Summarizing some of the most significant figures, Apple reported that its digital store policies (the app verification process, in-app payment policies, and others) have made it possible to avoid approximately $ 1.5 billion in potential fraudulent transactions. Apart from that, Apple also announced that it has blocked over 1.6 million applications and updates which contained within them del malicious code that could have deceived users, perhaps through the aforementioned phishing attempts.

Among the other numbers of the report we find more granular data regarding the illegal and suspicious activities blocked by Apple, further evidence of how a more rigid control of the store allows users to avoid running into potential scams or risks. According to reports from the company, the App Store has been called the safest place to search and download applications by independent researchers working in the field of security. In detail we talk about:

• 34,500 applications rejected by the app review team due to the presence of hidden and undocumented features
• 157,000 applications rejected as spam, copying or misleading
• 343,000 app rejected due to the request of a unjustified amount of user data and for mishandling the data already collected
• 94 million reviews and 170 million suspended and unpublished ratings as unsuitable for App Store moderation standards
• 610,000 reviews removed after publication following complaints from users and only after an analysis by human operators (ed: probably talking about misleading positive reviews)
• Blocked 3.3 million payment cards reported as stolen
• Closed 802,000 developer accounts identified as fraudulent and blocked another 153,000 before they could publish apps
• 170 million accounts associated with fraudulent users closed and the creation of another 118 million rejected