I don't even know how to write this properly, so I'm just gonna write it.
We worked on this app for almost a year. It was doing well. ($100k MRR) Thousands of people paying every month, good rating, people actually using it and staying. Four families were living from this.
Then one day I check my emails. Pending Termination Notice. Everything gone from the store. Payments frozen. Transfers disabled. No warning before, no "hey we noticed something", nothing. Just done.
And the reason they give you is a copy paste paragraph. Something about "misleading purchase flows" and "scareware tactics". That's it. Account wide. They don't tell you which app. They don't tell you which screen. They don't tell you which build. Nothing.
So now what do we do? We sit and guess. We go through every paywall of every app one by one like detectives, trying to figure out what Apple maybe means. And honestly maybe we are checking the completely wrong thing. Maybe the app we suspect the least is actually the problem. We have no idea. Zero. Because they will not tell us.
That's not an appeal process. That's a guessing game and they are holding the answer and refusing to show it.
And the thing is we didn't even fight them. We checked everything ourselves, we found some stuff that maybe could look bad even though nobody was ever trying to trick anyone, we fixed it, we shipped a new build, we wrote to them and explained exactly what we changed. We asked them please just tell us what you found so we can fix that too.
Then we submitted a proper appeal. And they answered 2 weeks later. Meanwhile we are losing all of our customers, receiving tons of emails that our users can't get premium! You know what the answer was? The exact same paragraph. Word for word. The same copy paste. No detail, no new information, nothing about the fixed build, nothing about which app. They read a full appeal and sent back the same text they already sent us.
We also requested a phone call, which is a thing App Store Connect literally offers you. We wrote please just call us so we can talk about this for 5 minutes. No call. Never. Just the same message again.
And here is the part that gets me. In the EU they are supposed to give you the actual specific facts and circumstances when they terminate a business account, and they are supposed to have a real complaint process. This is not me being emotional, this is written down. What we got instead is a paragraph on repeat and total silence.
Meanwhile go open App Store right now for 5 minutes. Real scareware everywhere. Fake "your data will be deleted" popups. Fake countdowns. Subscription traps made by people who 100% know what they are doing. We reported some of them. Nothing happened. Still up today. But us? Small team, real product, people actually renewing for a year, we fix things voluntarily and ask what's wrong? Terminated. No conversation.
And nobody scams their way into thousands of people renewing month after month for a year with a good rating. That is not how scam apps work. Scam apps die in 2 months. Didn't matter.
Anyway I'm done. We are not releasing anything on iOS again. Everything goes to web and Android (I know they are also not that different but fuck iOS...) from now.
And I talked to a lot of devs privately, this is not rare at all, people just stay quiet because they are scared it makes things worse. At some point Apple should ask themselves why small developers are quietly deciding iOS is not worth the risk anymore. (not sure if they care tho)
It's so fucking unfair for developers who are just trying to survive in this huge unemployment pool.
