Yesterday, App Store developers were paid for app purchases made during the period of June 2 through June 29, 2024. You may recall that Apple underpaid App Store developers for app bundle purchases made in February through May, due to a bug in Apple's accounting software. I wrote about this issue originally on May 10, with a follow-up on June 3. Fortunately, that issue appeared to be resolved. Unfortunately, a new issue appears to have arisen now.
Here's what I wrote in May:
I know that I'm making too little money rather than too much money because my actual recent payments from Apple are significantly smaller than the estimated proceeds over the same period in the Trends section of App Store Connect, which is how I noticed the issue in the first place, triggering my detailed investigation. I found that the estimated unit sales in Trends were about the same as the unit sales in the financial reports, despite the large disparity in proceeds. This is what led me to scrutinize every line item in the reports, where I found what appears to be an accounting error, a double subtraction from my proceeds.
Obviously, after that incident, I've been keeping a close eye on my App Store proceeds. When I compared App Store Connect Trends with App Store Connect Reports for the period of 6/2–6/29, I found a huge discrepancy in both proceeds and unit sales. The amount I was actually paid was only 56% of the estimate, for unit sales that were only 65% of the estimate. This is in gross contrast to the previous pay period of 5/5–6/1, when the amount I was actually paid was 98% of the estimate, for unit sales that were 99% of the estimate. Indeed, in most months the actual payment and the estimate are almost the same. June was a glaring exception.
Unlike with the previous underpayment problem, I don't have a "smoking gun" this time. There's no obvious problem in the line items of the financial reports. The app bundles do appear to be priced correctly. The problem now is just that a bunch of unit sales appear to be missing, along with the corresponding proceeds from those unit sales. I have no idea why.
I'm appealing to other App Store developers to make the same comparison that I did. Look at your financial reports from the June pay period as well as your proceeds and unit sales from 6/2–6/29 in App Store Connect Trends. If you find a large discrepancy, please let me know! And let the rest of the world know, via your own blogs or social media.
I've been looking at the line items in the June financial reports for the United States. Almost two-thirds of my sales come from the United States (probably because my apps are not localized). I have nine products for sale in the App Store: StopTheMadness Pro, StopTheMadness Pro Upgrade Bundle, StopTheMadness Pro Mobile Upgrade Bundle, StopTheMadness, StopTheMadness Mobile, Homecoming for Mastodon, Link Unshortener, StopTheFonts, and StopTheScript. What's interesting is that all nine of the products appear to be undercounted in unit sales for June. There's no single product that stands out as causing the discrepancy. Thus, it's clearly not the same problem with app bundle pricing as before.
After a couple of very helpful replies on Mastodon by fellow App Store developers, I now believe that Apple has not actually underpaid us in this case. Rather, there appears to be a software bug in App Store Connect Trends that causes unit sales to be doubled or even quadrupled starting on June 21, which accounts for the discrepancy with the financial reports. According to Michel Fortin,
Trends reports two sales of a particular IAP on the same day of June, while the financial report contains only one such purchase. The interesting thing is my app pings back my server for this IAP and I only see one matching purchase there. So if I had to guess: Trends double-count some transactions in some cases.
Inspired by this comment, I took a look at the daily unit sales for my lower-selling apps, i.e., everything other than StopTheMadness. ;-) These apps average less than one sale per day, which makes it a lot easier for me to identify individual sales. With four different apps, I saw the same pattern: the unit sales in the financial reports matched App Store Connect Trends until June 21, when the Trends started showing multiples of the individual unit sales in the financial reports.
Graham Dawson also showed me a chart with unusually elevated App Store unit sales during a two week period around the same time.
Thus, I think I can say, tentatively, that the situation is not as bad as earlier in the year, and Apple probably isn't screwing us out of money this time. Still, it's a terrible bug in Apple's systems that should never happen. History's most profitable corporation, scrupulously demanding a cut of all our proceeds as a "service," and just announcing record "services" revenue, has no excuse for acting so carelessly when it comes to our livelihoods. I'm getting tired of having to do free Quality Assurance work for that corporation.
I've found a post in the Apple Developer Forums discussing the discrepancy, which has been noticed by a number of App Store developers.
Yes, observed inflated Trends-sales numbers compared to Jun Payment and Financial Reports. What I observed and fascinating is that every unit number showing in Trends report from Jun 20 to Jun 30 is exactly double compared to actual sales showing in our in-app subscriptions management system.
I found another post in the Apple Developer Forums that suggests the double counting of unit sales is an issue with time zones.
I'm looking at my proceeds for the period from June 2, 2024 to June 29, 2024 (payout to occur on August 1st) when switching between UTC and PST timezones the difference is drastic - almost $10,000 - is this just an error in reporting?