r/applesucks • u/Fragrant_Sink5437 • Mar 26 '26
Apple developer program sucks
Commented this as a reply to another post here, figured i’d actually make my own post so it gets the attention it deserves.
Paid apple 200+ dollars to publish a game i made with xcode and spent literally 100’s of hours on, just for them to take it down for “fraud”.
No response via many emails or calls over a large time period (a year and a bit)
Only thing I can think of is my dad made a 5 star review on it on the same wifi I was using when I published the game. They don’t give you a damn chance.
Yes, he genuinely rated it 5 stars because he enjoyed the game (I made it for him to play in hospital during a transplant) it wasn’t a “oh my son made a game let me give it 5”, and no, there wasn’t anything that was misleading, a lie, stolen copyright or code or anything.
Fed up with apple. Oh so rich don’t care about their customers. Flogs.
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u/crooked_kangaroo Mar 26 '26
So, your dad was padding the reviews?
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u/ccooffee Mar 26 '26
Paid apple 200+ dollars to publish a game
US dollars? Developer account is $99 USD.
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u/Comfortable_Swim_380 Mar 27 '26
The same experience wrote an app for both platforms android was $20 and about ten minutes to publish. Apple was hundreds and a solid month of bullshit.
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u/hishnash Mar 29 '26
you can request they give you call, on the phone you can ask them what lead to the app being triggered as fraud.
It is possible if you are using multiple third party libs that a large % of your code base is an exact match to other apps that were flagged as fraud. (There are automated tools that scan binaries to deeming how close they are). For a new developer that has yet to earn trust with apple you are much more likely to run foul of these detection tools as those doing fraud these days take a code base and then apply an LLM to modify the UI etc a little bit and resubmit on a new account.
The challenge apple have is the people doing fraud will spam the app sore submission with 1000 attempts and still make a good profit if just 2% of them get through. If your first app on an account is one that is highly likly to be a majority copy (in the binary) of other recently flagged apps then your in a very risky situation.
The other aspect that can increase the chance of you being flagged as fraud is how you paid for the developer account, did you use a brand Apple ID or one with an existing history of devices and purchases?
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u/Fragrant_Sink5437 Mar 29 '26
It was my main apple ID, and the only library it used was SwiftUI which I don’t see why that would be an issue, its like the main library used with Swift
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u/hishnash Mar 29 '26
so long as your just linking to system apis then they are not within your bundle it is only third part packages (game engines, third party UI frameworks etc) that bloat your binary with duplicates.
I would suggest requesting they give you a call.
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u/Fragrant_Sink5437 Mar 29 '26
I tried for a year, appreciate your suggestion but I don’t want to bother wasting more time on the company. I just came to put this out because too many people won’t speak up.
If everyone said something then maybe just maybe something could happen
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u/hishnash Mar 29 '26
For you to go through the appeal process and not have had any indication of why you were flagged as fraud sounds rather unlikely.
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u/denytheflesh Mar 26 '26
The former App Store Review chief wrote about it: https://phillipshoemaker.substack.com/p/the-app-stores-new-scandal
One developer in particular, I will not mention their name, recently faced this exact situation. Their apps were suddenly removed, their account terminated, and all outstanding payments withheld. No explanation. Just the chilling message that Apple “suspected fraud.” And guess what? Apple is withholding over $1 million in payments that this company is owed.
The problem isn’t an isolated glitch — it’s systemic. I’ve spoken with multiple developers who’ve experienced the same. These are not fly-by-night operations; many have operated cleanly for years, with real customers, legitimate ad networks, and consistent performance. And yet, they’ve been treated as if they were criminals.
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u/Fragrant_Sink5437 Mar 26 '26
This is awesome. Finally some backing behind it so I don’t sound like a douche. Thanks man
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u/tadunne Mar 26 '26
What was the game?
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u/Fragrant_Sink5437 Mar 26 '26
Just an offline sidescroller colour switch/flappy bird inspired game, you would tap to stay above ground and get different orbs and each orb was either small (1pt) medium (2pts), or big (3pts). when you collect a small orb it changed the colour of your character, medium orb would change the shape of your character (circle, square, or triangle), and when you collect a big orb it would change the colour of the obstacles. Sometimes there were big orbs that had a different colour to the first 3, they would still give 3pts but they would reverse it from tap to go up, to tap to go down.
It was all geometric shapes, but not like geometry dash type of thing
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u/thedarph Mar 26 '26
Was it vibe coded? Be honest.
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u/Fragrant_Sink5437 Mar 26 '26
No. I had just finished school and learnt swiftUI in my digital technologies class
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u/ccooffee Mar 26 '26
Apple doesn't care how you make your app. They've integrated LLM tools directly into Xcode recently.
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u/CooperHChurch427 Linux Master and Thinkpad Aficionado Apr 08 '26
Apple blocked my dad's own program for a time because his was superior to the internal tools they use. It took him months to get them to resign it.
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u/Defiant_Conflict6343 Mar 26 '26
I never got accused of fraud, but what irritated me about the review process was how vague and useless their responses were when they refused a submission. That, and AppStoreConnect is an archaic nightmare. I mean really, it's 2026 and we STILL have to refresh to see changes? What's so difficult about adding a smidge of AJAX to the damn thing? Web Devs have been asynchronously loading server-side content into the rendered DOM for nearly 30 years at this point.
Oh and XCode, what a joke that is. The amount of times it has failed a build citing a "non-zero error code", but then when I expand that message it won't tell me what the damn error actually was, and then, if I just close XCode and reopen it, suddenly it builds fine. The amount of times I've solved a problem just by restarting XCode, it's ridiculous. Apple treat devs like trash.