Apple said on Tuesday that the company rejected nearly 1 million applications submitted to the App Store for the first time in 2020. Apple’s move is intended to respond to scrutiny including the Epic Games litigation and regulatory concerns of legislators and is also the latest sign that the company has become more transparent on how to approve and reject iPhone applications.
Apple claims that the company has established a system to approve 1.8 million apps and their updates in the App Store and review them according to a series of rules, which can protect iPhone users from fraud and avoid fraud. Open malware and poor user experience.
In terms of how Apple rejected apps in 2020, the company provided the following series of data:
- Rejected nearly 1 million applications submitted for the first time;
- Rejected nearly 1 million app updates;
- 48,000 applications were deleted due to the use of “hidden or undocumented features”, these features are usually Apple’s internal software tools for their own applications;
- 150,000 apps were deleted because they involved spam or copied another app;
- 215,000 apps were deleted because they collected too much user data or committed other violations of privacy;
- 95,000 apps were removed due to fraud, usually because they were changed to another app after Apple’s review, including gambling apps or pornographic apps;
- Apple cancelled 470,000 accounts from its developer programs for fraud.
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In addition, Apple said it rejected the installation of 3.2 million applications that use enterprise certificates last month. This is a tool used by large companies to install internal applications on commercial iPhones to circumvent App Store rules.
At the time when Apple disclosed the above-mentioned information, Fortress Night (Epic Games) developer Epic Games (hereinafter referred to as Epic) is an ongoing antitrust case against the company, trying to force Apple to allow it to provide its own iPhone App Store, thereby bypassing the 30% in-app purchase fee of the App Store. Epic’s lawyers argued that Apple’s App Store is a walled garden that hinders software developers that compete with it, and that Apple’s rules are uneven when applied to different developers.
Epic also said that Apple’s process is not perfect and that malware is sometimes allowed to appear on the App Store and pointed out that Apple’s own employees sometimes say that its process is not good enough to prevent fraud. During the trial, Epic questioned Trystan Kosmynka, the head of Apple’s application review department, and made it acknowledge that Apple did make mistakes in some of the apps it approved or rejected.
Apple showed a slide during the trial, indicating that between 2017 and 2019, the company used a combination of 500 manual reviewers and automated inspections to review approximately 5 million apps (including app updates) each year. The rejection rate ranges from 33% to 36%. Apple employees argued in the trial that compared with the size of its App Store, the company made insignificant errors.
Apple has always stated that the App Store is an indispensable and integral part of its business, saying it is the only way for consumers to install software on the iPhone. An attorney for the company argued last week that allowing users to install software from outside the App Store like Android would pose a security risk, and said that Apple does not want to adopt the Android model.
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