Flagged for fraud over an update that never shipped: what Apple is trading away

On October 28 a developer who posts on X as Stacy published a screenshot of an App Store Connect message titled Pending Termination Notice. The apps behind the account have made $114K. By the next morning the post had been seen about 180,000 times, and the replies were full of developers checking their own old rejections.

The story is short. More than six months ago, an update to an existing app added one library. App Review rejected it more than eight times, and almost never for the library. It objected to keywords that had been live for over a year, to a subtitle in one localization, to the screenshots, and in the end to the name of the app, which is the name most of its users type to find it.

Stacy asked for a call. The reviewer, described in the post as genuinely great, said the name was the last remaining issue. The app was renamed and resubmitted. Three days later a generic rejection arrived listing the subtitle and the screenshots again. At that point Stacy decided the update was not needed and dropped it.

Months later, in that same thread, Apple wrote that the account had been flagged for removal for "dishonest or fraudulent activity". The app is off the store. An appeal is with the App Review Board.

What the notice actually accuses

The screenshot shows the reasoning in one paragraph: "App submissions from your account have repeatedly violated the App Review Guidelines in an attempt to evade the review process. After multiple resubmissions, the guideline violation(s) detailed to you in prior correspondence remain unresolved." Earnings payments are paused, app transfers are disabled, and creating a new account "may result in the termination of the new or associated accounts."

Read it slowly. Nothing in it mentions a hidden feature, a fake review or a scam. The charge is a pattern: many resubmissions, and a violation still open at the end. That pattern fits a developer probing review to sneak something through. It fits just as well a developer who kept trying to satisfy reviewers, then gave up and stopped answering a thread they considered closed.

The rule behind it is guideline 5.6, the Developer Code of Conduct: "Repeated manipulative or misleading behavior or other fraudulent conduct will lead to your removal from the Apple Developer Program." Guideline 2.3.1 adds that "egregious or repeated behavior is grounds for removal." In both, the word carrying the weight is repeated, and resubmitting again and again is what conscientious developers do when a reviewer keeps finding something new.

The replies turned into a queue

Within a day, the thread had collected developers with the same letter. I read each of the posts below in full. Every one is the developer's own account, and none comes with Apple's side.

• @Tom4icecram has been making apps full time for over ten years, and their profile now reads "All Apps are currently down." Their summary: "Suddenly, an app they approved violates their agreement. They accuse you of dishonest or fraudulent activity. Your entire account comes down, taking years of unrelated work with it."
• @thebuildersince, a solo developer with eight live apps, had one rejected almost a year ago over a word in its name. The app was renamed, approved, then updated and approved again, and left alone for nine months. This week the same "repeatedly violated" wording arrived. "I never expected that being rejected, fixing it, and being approved would come back a year later as 'fraud.'" The appeal form, they note, takes 2,000 characters.
• David Razmadze, an iOS developer for more than six years, says the account was terminated this year "after being on the App Store for six years."
• Javi (@rameerez) wrote in July 2025 that notarization jobs for a macOS app had stalled for days, so the next step was an email to Developer Support, "and the next thing I know is they TERMINATED my entire Developer Account?!"

Stacy posted a follow-up the next morning with the details people kept asking for. The app is almost three years old, has a low refund rate and is live on Google Play. The library was there for ad attribution, and none of the rejections were about it. Stacy's theory is "a wave of automated bans that just check whether you had a streak of rejections in the past." Nobody outside Apple can confirm that. The @thebuildersince case fits it uncomfortably well, because there the rejection had been fixed and approved.

Some flags are right, and a story that looks clean in a post can look different once the other side is heard. In August John Gruber retracted an App Store rejection story, the first in 24 years of Daring Fireball, because the developer's account had misled him. I keep that in mind reading all of the above. What none of these developers describe is a warning with specifics before the notice.

Apple has a real fraud problem

None of this happens in a vacuum. In 2025 Apple terminated 193,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejected more than 138,000 enrolments. It removed nearly 59,000 apps for bait-and-switch, apps approved as a puzzle or a calculator and changed after review into tools for financial fraud, and rejected over 22,000 submissions for hidden or undocumented features.

On October 16, twelve days before Stacy's post, Apple tightened the guidelines again. A new 2.5.19 forbids hidden, dormant or undocumented features and names code obfuscation as grounds for termination. For apps with user-generated content, it added that developers who "fail to remediate identified violations after notice may be considered in violation of the Developer Code of Conduct." I do not know whether any of that reached Stacy's file. It does describe the mood App Review is working in this autumn.

Seen from inside that mood, an app that keeps coming back with the flagged issue still open looks like the opening move of a bait-and-switch. I understand why the pattern gets flagged. What I cannot defend is a flag that can end in a fraud verdict while the same thread contains a call in which a reviewer said there was one thing left to fix.

The sanction lands hardest on the people it was not written for

A fraud operation treats a developer account as a consumable. That is why there were 193,000 of them to terminate in a single year, and why the notice spends a sentence warning against opening new ones. For those people, being barred from the program for life is a line in a letter and the cost of a fresh identity.

For a developer whose app has earned six figures and whose users find it by name, the same line ends the business on Apple platforms. Every app under the account leaves the store, along with its ratings, its rankings and the users who would have received the next version. The person who never cut a corner is the one who has the most to lose from a sanction designed for people who have nothing to lose.

There is also nowhere else to go on iOS. Since iOS 17.4, EU users can install apps from alternative marketplaces and from developers' websites, and that is often cited as the answer to App Store power. Those apps still have to be notarized by Apple, and Apple's own description of a marketplace is a service that receives notarized apps "from other Apple Developer Program members." The guidelines say violating apps are "removed from the App Store and blocked from installing via alternative distribution." A terminated account has no route to an iPhone in any country.

Where those developers go instead

So they go to Android and to the web, and they take their next ideas with them. Stacy's app is already on Google Play, doing fine by Stacy's account. That is the part I think Apple is underpricing.

I have been an iOS developer since iPhone OS 2, on the day the App Store opened in July 2008. Every app I have published since then sits under one Apple account, and after eighteen years of it I am still afraid that a notice like this one could land in my own inbox one morning. I have never bought a review, hidden a feature or shipped one thing to the reviewer and another to users. Reading Stacy's thread, I am no longer sure that is enough.

One of my own apps is already a casualty of that fear. Sing It Like Britney: Karaoke had a core feature, Chaos Mode, that set it apart from other karaoke apps when it launched. Then a review once decided it was a copy of other apps. I do not think it was, but I do not want that flag sitting on my account while notices like Stacy's are going out, so I removed the app from the App Store myself, on purpose, to keep my account out of reach of a pattern like Stacy's. It was iOS only when I decided to remove it, and in the near future its development will move to Android only.

I build native and iPhone first because for most of those years the deal was clear. You follow the rules, you get rejected, you fix what the reviewer names, you ship. A rejection could be slow, petty or plainly wrong, and it was still a conversation that ended with a decision about one build.

What wears that trust down is inconsistency far more than strictness. Keywords approved for a year get rejected on an update that did not touch them. A reviewer on the phone names the last problem and the next reviewer lists three others. A submission you walked away from comes back months later as evidence against you. Each of those teaches a developer that a past approval protects nothing, and that being persistent and responsive can be read as an attempt to evade.

People choosing today where to build first will draw the obvious conclusion. If a stalled update can turn into a fraud file, a small team should make sure the iPhone app is never the whole business: Android from the first release, a web version where it makes sense, a list of users that Apple does not hold. Each of those is sensible risk management. Each also makes iOS one channel among several for exactly the developers who used to treat it as the main one.

Google Play is not a refuge. Its help pages say a terminated account loses all its apps, users, statistics and ratings, that related accounts are terminated with it, and that new accounts will be terminated too. Spreading across stores does not make any single one fairer. It makes a single decision survivable.

If you have an old rejection sitting in App Store Connect

Nobody outside Apple knows exactly what moves a file from rejected to flagged. These are the habits I would adopt today, and none of them is a guarantee.

1. Close abandoned threads in writing. If you have decided not to ship a rejected version, reply to App Review and say you are withdrawing the change and will not resubmit it. The notice talks about violations that "remain unresolved", and a rejection you stopped answering looks exactly like that from the other side.
2. Keep every rejection message and screenshot, including the ones you resolved. The @thebuildersince case was fixed and approved, and it still came back a year later. If you ever have to appeal, the record of what you changed and when is the evidence you have.
3. Put every call in the thread. After a phone call with App Review, post a short written summary of what was agreed. The next reviewer reads the thread, and a call leaves nothing in it.
4. Resubmit only with a change and a note. Each submission should fix something named in the last rejection and say so in the Notes for Review. Several resubmissions in a row with the same metadata look like probing, whatever the intent.
5. Use the bug fix path when it applies. The guidelines say that for apps already on the store, "bug fixes will not be delayed over guideline violations except for those related to legal or safety issues." You ask for it in App Store Connect and commit to addressing the issue in the next submission.
6. Do not open a new account after a notice. The letter says it can take the new account down too. Appeal to the App Review Board, answer exactly what the notice cites, and if the rule is 5.6, follow the way back the guideline itself describes: "a written statement detailing the improvements you plan to make."
7. Keep your users reachable outside the store. An email list, a website, an Android version. With those in place a termination is a terrible month. Without them it is the end of the company.

If you are dealing with a rejection right now, I wrote about what Apple rejects under 4.2 and 4.3 and about what a long review actually means, and there is a page here on getting a rejected app through.

What Apple is trading away

App Review exists to keep the store trustworthy, and every honest developer benefits when it works. A system that cannot tell a fraudster from someone who gave up on an update after eight rounds spends a different kind of trust, the one developers place in Apple, and it spends it on the people the platform needs most. They answer every rejection, rename their app when asked and get on the phone. They are also the ones with a real business that could move.

I hope the App Review Board reverses this one quickly, and I hope Apple says publicly that walking away from a rejected update is not fraud. Until it does, the advice I give clients will include an Android version and a mailing list, and that advice did not used to be about Apple.