Apple publishes its App Store fraud prevention report every year,. And when it does, the company presses the point that its curated system brings much value to developers and customers, including highly effective protection against fraud. It says it prevented more than $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2025 alone.

A tax worth paying

The company said it has prevented $11.2 billion in such fraud in the last six years. That’s a lot of value for the 15% or lower commission that all but the biggest-selling developers are required to pay on their store sales.

Don’t believe the hype, as most developers are not generating the $1 million a year required before the 30% payment kicks in.

You might reflect that if there is an Apple Tax, it’s a progressive tax in which those with the broadest shoulders help support the wider developer community, which is probably why some tech billionaires don’t like it. 

But I’m not here to write about taxation; I’m here to highlight the value the App Store brings. Apple diligently works to protect customers and developers against the ever-growing threat of cybercrime at a scale few other companies could hope to match. That matters in an environment dominated by ever more sophisticated attacks, including scenarios in which a developer submits a benign app for review and then modifies it once the app is online to commit financial fraud.

More than fraud prevention

It’s not just fraud Apple protects App Store customers from. It also attempts to protect privacy. Look, we know that tech firms now exist for whom privacy is a roadblock to profit; they want to take all your information for free to sell it for money, or worse. Apple stands against this and has done so for years, which is why it is under steady attack by entities that want privacy destroyed to boost their bottom line. Nation states and nation-state-adjacent attacks don’t help in the battle for your private digital life, throwing huge resources at undermining personal protections.

Apple’s report gives you a solid glimpse at the anti-privacy environment. App Store rejected 443,000 app submissions for privacy violations; it also rejected 22,000 apps for holding undocumented anti-privacy features. 

The upshot is that while Apple’s protections aren’t 100% perfect, they’re still industry leading. Where incidents do take place, they are resolved swiftly, and the bait-and-switch approach (in which an app pretends to be benign but carries malware) remains the biggest threat. That’s why customers should always verify they trust a developer before downloading apps.

The threats coming over the hill

The thing is, all of these threats are evolving, and Apple is equipped to evolve in parallel with them. In part, that’s because it has scale, in part because it has that huge 2.2-billion-device ecosystem, in part because the company entered the app store race with deep understanding of how online transactions were evolving in the first place. It didn’t run iTunes for years only to learn nothing.

Coming up over the hill we can see new-breed quantum-based threats. Along with artificial intelligence, that combination will likely spawn a mass attack of AI-generated, malware-infested apps being built and submitted at a record pace. 

We will also likely see increased attacks made against developers in order to extract their Developer ID to help in the submission of such apps. And we will see increasingly sophisticated algorithmic hacks to attack security, identity, and even app ownership. Protecting against those consequential evolutions will be neither easy nor cheap. Doing so will require near state-level protection, a degree of security no small entity can meet. We have no idea if smaller app stores can even visualize such protection — and the EU doesn’t know, either.

In time, hopefully, new businesses will emerge offering quantum-safe security to protect online purchases. But for now, we’ll mostly need to look to large entities such as Apple, or payment services providers, to make the grade. 

Near state-level protection

Will Apple put protection at scale in place to protect against these incoming threats against its App Store? It seems likely, given it is already investing in OS-level mitigations to protect encryption on its services, including around encrypted communications. 

It is also in Apple’s interest to future-proof protection around payment services, ergo also the App Store. At the same time, as Apple’s latest fraud report confirms, the threat landscape remains highly volatile. Time will show that the store’s degree of protection is well worth the cost of Apple’s progressive App Store tax. 

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Google’s shiny new Android 17 update may be on the brink of making its way out into world, but one of the most consequential Android notification upgrades I’ve seen in ages is actually available for anyone, on any device, this instant.

It’s one of those things you don’t even realize is missing — and awkwardly has been, all this time — until you have it in front of you and see just how helpful and at times even invaluable it is.

And that’s the ability to have any or all of your notifications saved and restored whenever you restart whatever Android device you’re using — so that nothing important gets awkwardly tossed aside, lost, and forgotten, likely without your ever even noticing or being aware of what you’ve missed.

How many potentially important pending alerts have you lost as a result of that reboot trash chute? I couldn’t even begin to count, myself, and am slightly terrified to think of the answer. But with this easy new improvement in place, it’ll never happen again.

And best of all? It’ll take you roughly two minutes, once, to set up and then forget about and just know it’s working on your behalf from that moment forward.

Lemme show ya how.

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Your new Android notification safety net

The secret sauce that makes this sorcery possible comes not from Google itself but from a crafty independent developer who’s been expanding our Android notification smarts for many a moon now.

His app is called BuzzKill. You’ve probably heard me rave about it before, with other noteworthy features and additions it’s introduced over time.

Whether you already have BuzzKill on your device or this is your first time encountering it, though, it’s well worth your while to take note of this new capability that snuck into the app not long ago.

First, a quick primer/refresher on what BuzzKill is, in case you aren’t already familiar: BuzzKill is essentially a way to create Gmail-like filters for your Android notifications. You use it to create simple custom rules for what happens when different types of notifications arrive — in an intuitive “if this, then that”-style form — with all kinds of interesting and advanced options for making your alerts more effective.

The latest addition to the app is an experimental option called, appropriately enough, “Restore after reboot.” And it does exactly what you’d expect: Anytime your device restarts, it automatically swoops in to save any active notifications that fit the parameters you select and then instantly restores ’em back into active status once your phone is back up and running.

Without such a system in place, any notifications that you either hadn’t yet looked at or maybe had glanced at and left pending as a reminder to deal with later would more often than not just vanish entirely — and you’d have no easily visible record of their presence or any real indication that they’d been there at all. That’s a dangerous recipe for forgetting something important, whether it’s an email you intended to engage with, a Slack message you needed to acknowledge, or even a task of some sort that had popped up for you to ponder.

The beauty of the BuzzKill approach to fixing this is that it really is a “set it and forget it” sort of system: You just create whatever rule you want now, get it up and running, and then rest easy knowing it’ll always find and restore any active notifications anytime your device restarts — as Android itself should but for whatever reason does not.

2 minutes to auto-restored Android notifications

All right — here are the specific steps to getting your new notification safety net in place:

• First, go download BuzzKill from the Play Store, if you don’t already have it.
  • The app costs four bucks as a one-time purchase, which — believe me — is nothing compared to the ongoing value it’ll give you with this and its many other notification-enhancing possibilities.
  • It doesn’t require any unusual permissions, doesn’t collect any form of data from your phone, and doesn’t have any manner of access to the internet — meaning it’d have no way of sharing your information even if it wanted to. 
• Once you’ve gone through the app’s initial setup and made your way to its main screen, tap on the circular button in the lower-right corner of the screen to create a new rule.
• On the screen that comes up next, consider which specific sorts of notifications you want to have restored whenever your device restarts.
  • You could always start with any and all notifications and then go back in to refine and limit the rule more once you see how it works. You might eventually want to ask it to avoid restoring alerts from certain low-priority apps — like, say, Google Photos — so that it doesn’t bother bringing back stuff that you don’t actually need.
  • If/when you want to create any such restrictions, tap the text that says “any app” to change which apps will be included and/or tap the text that says “contains anything” if you want to restrict based on what specific text a notification does or doesn’t include.
  • If you don’t want to create any limitations and just want all of your active notifications to be restored, at least to start, leave those lines alone and mosey on down to our next step.

JR Raphael, Foundry

• Tap the line that says “do nothing” and scroll down to find the “Restore after reboot” option. It’ll be toward the bottom of the list, within the “System actions” section.

JR Raphael, Foundry

• Tap that, then tap “Pick action” to confirm.
• And last but not least, tap “Save rule” to, y’know, save your rule and set it into action.

JR Raphael, Foundry

You should then see the rule showing up as active and running on the main BuzzKill screen.

JR Raphael, Foundry

And that really is all there is to it: Whenever your phone next restarts, any notifications that were visible and active at the time of the restart should just show back up via BuzzKill as soon as things boot back up. If you want to get fancy, you could even make certain especially important notifications “sticky” in general, so that if you inadvertently swipe ’em away while your phone is running normally, they’ll automatically come right back even in that scenario.

It’s not the flashiest feature you’ll see this year, and it doesn’t have any whizbang AI shenanigans to make it seem headline-worthy by current-day standards. But it will work and quite possibly be one of the most practical, actually helpful additions you make to your phone all year — even if and arguably especially if you only think about it once in a great while, when you notice it working its magic and saving you from losing something significant.

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