Apple's App Store blocked more than $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2025. This is a marked increase year-over-year, from $2 billion stopped in 2024. The report comes at a time when the platform's gatekeeping role is under sharper scrutiny than it has been in years.
Apple says its App Store Review team evaluated over 9.1 million app submissions during 2025 alone. The company also blocked more than 1.1 billion fraudulent customer account creations, removed nearly 59,000 apps it identified as engaging in bait-and-switch financial fraud tactics, and identified close to 195 million fraudulent ratings and reviews.
The fraud prevention at this scale is central to maintaining confidence in the platform since the App Store generated over $550 billion in developer earnings since its launch in 2008, according to one industry estimate.
Apple App Store False Positives: When Fraud Filters Catch Legitimate Developers
The report omits error-rate transparency, which is at the centre of growing complaint from within the developer community. According to Game World Observer, the former head of App Store Review has claimed that Apple is increasingly blocking legitimate developer accounts based on erroneous fraud suspicions. The claim could not be independently verified.
But when a detection system processes hundreds of millions of signals annually, even a fractional false-positive rate translates into a significant absolute number of wrongly affected accounts. Apple has not published a false-positive rate.
A wrongful account termination can mean an immediate loss of revenue, loss of access to years of development data, and no clear appeals path. Apple offers a developer appeals process, but the company has not disclosed resolution timelines or overturn rates.
How Apple's App Store Fraud Numbers Compare to Google Play Store 2025
Apple is not alone in confronting platform fraud at scale. Google Play Store, the App Store equivalent for Android devices worldwide, blocked over 1.75 million potentially malicious app submissions from its platform in 2025. Google attributed the improvement partly to advances in its own AI-based review systems, with the figure representing a decline from the prior year as those defenses matured.
Google's threat environment extends beyond the Play Store itself. Google Play Protect, the company's on-device security service for Android, identified 27 million new malicious apps that had been sideloaded onto devices in 2025, doubling the figure from the previous year, according to Engadget. Sideloading refers to the installation of apps from sources outside an official app marketplace, a practice Apple's iOS platform does not permit.
Apple and Google operate under different distribution models, serve different user bases, and publish their enforcement figures using different methodologies. Neither company releases audited, third-party-verified fraud statistics, meaning both sets of numbers rest on self-reported data.
Apple's 2025 fraud report covers a platform that has, since 2008, become the primary software marketplace for roughly half of all smartphone users in the United States. The stakes of getting enforcement calibration wrong, in either direction, are correspondingly high. Block too little, and consumers face financial harm from fraudulent apps and stolen payment credentials. Block too aggressively, and legitimate developers lose access to a platform they have no alternative to reach their iPhone-owning customers.
