December 10 2025
How can an App Store developer reach 10 million users? It turns out that the process is surprisingly quick and easy, just three steps. The key to the process is optimizing App Store app screenshots:
- In the screenshots, lie about having 10 million users.
- Submit the app to Apple for review.
- Get approved by Apple.
It’s that simple! You now have 10 million users in the App Store, as verified by Apple.
Here’s an example, LeClean · AI Cleaner App by the developer ALLPRO INTERIOR OU.
Version 1.0 of the app was released on October 14, only two months ago. It sure accumulated 10 million users quickly! Curiously, those 10 million users left only 184 ratings in the US App Store. (Ratings and reviews are country-specific.)
LeClean has no support link, and its privacy policy link https://leclean.site/page77159336.html is broken; the domain leclean.site does not seem to exist. Did Apple app review never try to click it?
The app has a 3-day free trial—the minimum length of a trial in the App Store—and a $9.99 USD auto-renewing subscription. This “business model” is very popular among scammers, for obvious reasons.
By the way, the developer also lied about not being a trader in the European Union:
ALLPRO INTERIOR OU has not identified itself as a trader for this app. If you are a consumer in the European Economic Area, consumer rights do not apply to agreements between you and the provider.
Although I live in the US, I can check trader identification with a simple trick: replace the /us/ country code in the apps.apple.com URL with the code for a country in the EU, such as /ie/ for Ireland. One of the legal requirements of an EU trader is to publish contact information such as an address and phone number, so you can understand why an anonymous scammer would want to avoid that.
How did I find this App Store scam? I didn’t. It was found by Thomas Reed, formerly of Malwarebytes. And Reed found the app by following a scam advertisement on the web.
I wrote about this kind of scam earlier in the year. In that case, the scam app in question, which was subsequently removed from the App Store (I suspect thanks to my reporting, but no thanks to me from Apple), also falsely claimed to be “Trusted by millions of users worldwide.”
John Gruber of Daring Fireball recently wrote,
I could be wrong, but my sense is that Apple has, without much fanfare, cracked down on scams and rip-offs in the App Store. That doesn’t mean there’s none. But it’s like crime in a city: a low amount of crime is the practical ideal, not zero crime. Maybe Apple has empowered something like the “bunco squad” I’ve wanted for years? If I’m just unaware of blatant rip-offs running wild in the App Store, send examples my way.
Here you go, John! And I found a bunch of other examples just by browsing around the “You Might Also Like” section of the first scam app’s App Store page. Boost Clean: Ai Cleaner App by the developer OS Invest OU (who has also not identified as a trader in the EU) claims “10M+ of people liked our app,” verbatim with grammatical error from the screenshot.
Version 1.0 of Boost Clean—misspelled as Boost Cleaner in the screenshot—was released on November 21, only a few weeks ago. Congratulations on the explosive user growth! Here’s one App Store user’s review of the app:
Apparently Boost Clean also exploits the same scare tactic to acquire victims, err, users.
PristineClean: AI Cleaner App by the developer OLD SPORT LLC (not an EU trader either) claims to have acquired “10M+ Global Users” since the release of version 1.0 in June, though the app has only 647 ratings in the US App Store.
Meanwhile, CleanVibe: AI Photo Cleaner (was it vibe-coded?) by developer Sandre Javahis (no surprise, not an EU trader) claims to be not only “Trusted by 10M+ users” but also the “Leading AI Cleaner Worldwide.” That’s quite an accomplishment since the release of version 1.0 in April!
Secura: AI Phone Security Tool by the developer IT ATMAN, SRL (you guessed it, not a trader), version 1.0 released September 23, claims to have “10M+ Users Worldwide” and to be the “#1 AI Cleaner App,” which seems to contradict the claims of some of the other mentioned apps.
All of the apps mentioned here have 3-day trials before their In-App Purchase, customary for scams. Get the money ASAP before users remember to cancel, if they remember at all.
As an App Store developer myself, what bothers me the most is actually that the App Store has strict screenshot requirements, depending on specific device screen sizes—I can’t even take a Mac App Store screenshot on my expensive new “notched” M4 MacBook Pro—yet none of the above images are really screenshots of the apps! They’re merely advertising banners in the size of a device screen. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only developer in the App Store who respects the rules and publishes unadorned screenshots of my apps to show to potential users. Perhaps I’m too honest for this business.