If you have citations of GPLv2 or GPLv3 apps that are in the App Store, I would be highly interested.

As far as I can discern, Linphone is provided in the App Store under a proprietary license, VLC had to relicense as LGPL, and GNU Go is still not on the App Store.

VLC-iOS is licensed GPLv2. https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc-ios/#license

The App store version is almost certainly using MPLv2, which is a file based copyleft license. Much weaker than GPLv2.

My understanding is that Apple doesn't ban GPLvX code - that doesn't mean other people won't write Apple and ask the app to be removed, claiming the app developer did not have proper copyright license.

I don’t think anyone’s tried it, because it was certainly not allowed a couple of years ago. But the language that the FSF used to point to is no longer there, so I’d like to hope that it might be possible today.

It’s not so much that it’s banned; it’s that because the GPLv3 allows users to modify their software and Apple doesn’t without their developer licenses, you can’t give the user all the freedoms the license provides.