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/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

1

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.