Apple today released its first App Store transparency report, which the company has agreed to provide to developers as part of its 2021 lawsuit settlement. Under the terms of the agreement, Apple provides developers with information about the app review process on the number of rejected apps, the number of customer and developer accounts disabled, the number of apps removed from the “App Store”, search query and results data, and more.

All the information requested by the developers is included in the 2022 ‌App Store‌ Transparency Report and accompanying additional data, and the report is available for download from Apple’s legal website.

In 2022, there were 1,783,232 apps in the ‌App Store‌, 6,101,913 received apps, and 1,679,694 apps rejected for various reasons, including security, performance, design, and legal reasons. Apple provides figures for specific “App Store” guidelines violated by apps rejected with the highest number of rejections per rule (149,378) due to violation of Design Rule 4.0 and DPLA Fraud Rule 3.2 (32.009).

A total of 253,466 app applications were approved after being rejected, and 186,195 apps were removed from the “App Store” for violating “App Store” policies as the developers worked with Apple to resolve the issues. Most of the apps removed from the ‌App Store‌ are games, followed by utilities, work, and education.

Apple summarizes the total number of apps removed from the “App Store” due to government removals, with China at the top of the list. The Chinese government asked Apple to remove 1,435 apps, but 1,276 of them were games that were removed because they didn’t have a GRN license required by China.

Apple removed 14 apps at the request of the Indian government, 10 apps for Pakistan, and seven apps for Russia. In other countries, such as Turkey, Bulgaria, Cypress, Hong Kong, Italy, Latvia and Nigeria, less than two programs were abolished at the request of the government.

In total, the developers objected to the removal of 18,412 apps, and Apple only reinstated 616 developer accounts. Apple says that disputed apps are often removed from the “App Store” due to fraud or illegality, which is why the number of objections rejected is so high.

There are 36,974,015 registered developers, and in 2022, Apple closed 428,487 developer accounts. According to Apple, developers are removed from the Apple Developer Program “for several reasons”, but most often due to accounts linked to other defunct developer accounts. 3,338 developers objected to the “App Store” ban, and Apple only reinstated 159 accounts. Again, Apple says this is because “many of the controversial developer account removals have been removed from the “App Store” for fraudulent reasons, so Apple rejects most of them.