At one point, there was a case for preventing scammy and fraudulent apps. For a long time, the ios App store had a much higher quality than android.
But now? There are tons of scammy and fraudulent apps on the app store. If you try to search for any popular app, you'll be presented with a dozen apps that look similar with similar names and logos.
Like when you search for anything "AI" and get bombarded with a wall of minimalist goatse
Apple's "manual review" process stopped meaning anything to me when they verified a trojan horse version of LastPass: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...
I don't even know how this is possible. FOSS repos have more security than that...
Also: gambling apps. Legal, sure, but also incredibly scammy.
Yep. And this has been the case for over a decade.
They might do some sampling, but they're definitely not checking everything.
The first app I published in 2012 had a backend, but the Apple team never logged in with the provided credentials, or even tried anything.