Tech giant Apple claimed that the measures taken to detect malicious apps and actions by developers on the App Store saved users as much as $1.5 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2020.
The company published detailed statistics on fraud prevention, which prevented more than a million risky and vulnerable apps off the App Store. There are more than 1.8 million apps on the Apple App Store for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices. The company has highlighted that the measures in place prevented stolen cards from making transactions, apps that switch functionality after initial review for App Store listing, account frauds by users and developers as well as verified fraudulent reviews.
Apple says that more than 48,000 apps were rejected for containing hidden or undocumented features. The App Review team also rejected more than 1,50,000 apps for spam– copying other popular apps or misleading users with regards to functionality. While over 2,15,000 apps were also rejected for violating the privacy policy guidelines.
The company also had security measures in place for payment methods and didn’t permit more than 3 million stolen credit and debit cards from purchasing on the App Store. In these wide-ranging measures in place, as many as 1 million user accounts were banned from any transactions, 244 million customer accounts were deactivated, 424 million account creation attempts were rejected, and 470,000 developer accounts were terminated for various violations.
“Apple has rejected or removed apps that switched functionality after initial review to become real-money gambling apps, predatory loan issuers, and pornography hubs; used in-game signals to facilitate drug purchasing; and rewarded users for broadcasting illicit and pornographic content via video chat,” says Apple.
Additionally, 95,000 apps were also removed because they asked users for more data than they needed or mishandled the data that was collected. Apple has repeatedly insisted that privacy is a fundamental right, something that Apple CEO Tim Cook has also asserted, time and again, ahead of the rollout of the new Privacy Labels for all apps on the App Store and the addition of the App Tracking Transparency feature in iOS 14.5 for the iPhone.