After years of exposing App Store fraud and taking Apple to court, we built The App Sleuth — an independent trust score that cuts through fake reviews, hidden charges, and predatory ads so you know exactly what you’re downloading.
You’re about to download an app.
Maybe it’s for you. Maybe it’s for your kid. You check the rating — 4.8 stars, thousands of reviews. Looks fine. You hit download.
Here’s what you probably don’t know: that rating may have been bought. Those reviews may have been written by bots. And the app itself may exist for no other reason than to get onto your phone and take something from you — your money, your data, or your child’s attention.
This isn’t rare. Based on what we’ve seen, a significant portion of apps on the store today are scams in some form. And they don’t look like scams anymore. They look polished. Professional. Sometimes better designed than the legitimate apps sitting right next to them.
There’s Finally a Better Way
That’s why we built The App Sleuth.
One place to check before you download. Enter any app name or store URL and get an instant Sleuth Score — an independent integrity rating built on what actually matters:
- Fake review detection — identifying bot-generated and manufactured ratings
- Hidden charge patterns — surfacing subscription traps and unauthorized billing signals
- Ad behavior — flagging aggressive, inescapable, or deceptive ad mechanics
- False advertising — measuring the gap between what an app promises and what it delivers
- Data collection — identifying apps that harvest more than they need
- Age appropriateness — applying real standards, not just the label the developer assigned themselves
Not the star rating. Not the age label. The actual evidence.
We are independent. No developer pays us to boost a score. No platform has a stake in our results.
Try it now at AppSanityCheck.com
Why We Built It — and Why We’re the Right People To
Kosta and I have been building apps on the App Store since nearly the beginning. Two people. A mom and a dad. Honest software, raised alongside our kids.
Over fifteen years, we watched the store change. And not for the better.
Here’s something most people don’t realize: every app on the App Store pays Apple 30% of everything it earns. That’s thirty cents of every dollar. Which means when a scam app charges someone $99 for a subscription they never agreed to, Apple collects its cut too.
That’s not an accusation. It’s a structural reality. And it’s why the platform has never had a strong financial incentive to clean things up.
In 2021, after scam apps began directly targeting our own work — cloning our apps, stealing our marketing, siphoning our downloads — we put everything else down to document exactly how bad it had become. Kosta built a detection tool that could scan the App Store at scale. Together, we dug into what it found.
What we found wasn’t a fringe problem. It was systemic.
A crypto wallet draining a user’s life savings. A children’s game concealing an online casino. A VPN quietly extracting $5 million a year from people who had no idea they were being charged.
Our findings became source material for TechCrunch, The Verge, and Forbes. They reached the floor of the U.S. Senate, where Senator Jon Ossoff asked Apple’s Chief Compliance Officer directly why scams that were “trivially easy to identify” kept slipping through — and why families had to rely on independent reporting to find them. (TechCrunch, April 22, 2021)
We filed KPAW LLC v. Apple in March 2021. The case proceeded and settled in 2022. (TechCrunch, September 1, 2022)
Many of the apps we cited as evidence are still available on the App Store today. We checked.
The Weight of This Falls on Parents
Internal Apple documents from the Epic v. Apple litigation revealed something that didn’t get nearly enough attention: Apple’s own executives understood that the burden of evaluating app trustworthiness had been placed on users, and therefore parents.
Not on them. On us.
I feel it every time I want to download something. What should take thirty seconds turns into fifteen or twenty minutes — checking the developer, cross-referencing reviews, looking for red flags that shouldn’t be my job to find. And even then, I’m not certain.
That’s not a personal failure. That’s a design failure. The research process that should protect our families has been made nearly impossible by the sheer volume of fake reviews, inflated ratings, and misleading descriptions now present at scale.
Our kids deserve better than that. So do we.
It’s Only Getting Harder
The scams have evolved.
AI writes convincing five-star reviews at scale now. Copycat apps are nearly indistinguishable from the originals. Subscription traps are buried in onboarding flows so carefully designed that even technically sophisticated users miss them. Data harvesting apps dress themselves as useful utilities just to earn the download — and the permissions that come with it.
The platforms are not keeping up. And they have no real incentive to.
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