For the first time, Apple has published an App Store transparency report. You can read the full two-page document on the company’s website. It reveals several interesting tidbits about the App Store, including the fact that, as of 2022, there were 1,783,232 apps on the storefront.
In the document, first spotted by 9to5Mac (via The Verge), Apple also reveals that it reviewed 6,101,913 submissions last year (submissions can include updates to existing apps, not just new releases). Of those, it rejected 1,679,694. Surprisingly, the majority of submissions, more than 1 million, didn’t make it to the App Store for failing to comply with Apple’s performance guidelines. The company also rejected 441,972 submissions on legal grounds.
Apple also removed 186,195 apps removed from the App Store in 2022. Last year, the company fielded 1,474 takedown requests, with the vast majority (1,435, to be exact) coming from mainland China. In a distant second was India, with 14 requests. Over that same time frame, Apple says it fielded 5,484 appeals involving apps removed from the App Store in China. Following successful appeals, it also restored 169 apps to the Chinese App Store. Last year, iPhone, iPad and Mac users downloaded an average of 747,873,877 apps every week, which would be an even more impressive number if they didn’t also redownload an average of 1,539,274,266 apps every week.
Apple agreed to begin publishing App Store transparency reports as part of a settlement the company came to with App Store developers in 2021. At the time, the company said the reports would “share meaningful statistics about the app review process, including the number of apps rejected for different reasons, the number of customer and developer accounts deactivated, objective data regarding search queries and results, and the number of apps removed from the App Store.”