My name is Viktor Seraleev, and I live in Chile. I’m founder of Sarafan Mobile Limited (team ID G5293S9UFX). Our developer account was closed on September 21, 2023. We specialize in developing photo and video applications for creators.

According to App Store benchmarks, almost all of our applications consistently ranked in the highest category for retention on the 1st and 28th day. The average rating for our applications was above 4.5. You can check out our apps on Google Play, where they also boast excellent performance. Further validating the high quality of our applications are approved grants from Xiaomi, totaling $150,000 for advertising expenses across three of our apps.

The removal of applications resulted in the following losses:

• Apple has not paid us $108,878 revenue (this amount is for 3 months).
• Our 6 applications had a total of $33,680 MRR as of September 20, 2023.
• One day before removal, we had 1209 active trials.
• We are left without means of existence. The applications were our sole source of income. I cannot convey the challenges that we and our families have faced due to the account termination.

Here's our story:

On August 21, 2023, Apple removed our Reely application during the update review. Along with the removal, we received a notification citing a violation of section 3.2(f) of the Apple Developer Program License Agreement:

Upon further review of the activity associated with your Apple Developer Program membership, we have determined that your membership, or a membership associated with your account, has been used for dishonest or fraudulent activity. Therefore, your Apple Developer Program account has been flagged for removal.

If you would like to appeal this termination decision to the App Review Board, you must do so within 30 calendar days.

The notice did not identify any developer accounts that Sarafan’s account was allegedly associated with. The notice also did not identify what steps Sarafan was required to take to preserve its account, stating only that Sarafan had 30 days to appeal the decision. I removed access from all accounts, leaving only the full-time developers. Additionally, I asked the developers to log out of all accounts they might be connected to.

We addressed potential violations and filed an appeal on the same day. On September 6, 2023, we received a rejection: