Why would they if they can keep aka escrow $100k?

$100k is literally meaningless to Apple.

If any amount of money was meaningless to apple, they wouldn't be where they are today.

That's not how money or business works. Opportunity costs means that many "amounts of money" can be meaningless to the business depending on the activity to get to them, the negatives (from processing hasles like lawsuits to PR and brand image), their overall strategy and focus, and other such concerns.

A company at Apple's level absolutely doesn't see "frozing $100K" from random devs (or the amount that would result in aggregate from all those freezings) as a profit center.

The irrationality is the problem. $100k is nothing. The loss of developer good will is worth far more than that.

But Apple doesn't care, because it relies on shady apps for a significant part of App Store income.

So the decision is "Do we make significant money from addictive games and scams and tolerate the occasional false positive that nukes a legitimate developer? Or do we spend significant resources curating an App Store full of quality apps and no noise, with high quality support for devs with problems?"

Guess which one of those is going to bring in significantly more money.

"The loss of developer good will is worth far more than that."

This has been going on for a long time.

Developer good will lost? Then they can just go to the other iOS store to sell there apps, oops.

From the large corps I've worked with - those that made $B in revenue - they do everything to reach rev goals they told investors they would reach, every $100k counts. If you think a large corp is throwing away money, think twice.

My experience is that for ever one event we hear about or makes the news there are 10-100x that suffer in silence and never get heard.

Apple's revenue is $12,000 per second.

The revenue you make is not important, the growth in revenue is important.

In the time it took you to compose this reply, Apple made more money (in profit, not revenue) than the amount in TFA. Your cynicism borders on conspiracy theory!

The accounting hassles of escrow and eventual escheatment of the $100k will probably cost Apple more than $100k. This is not a profit center.

I see it more like coupons, you escrow $1M and b/c companies go bankrupt, management change etc. in the end you keep some of the money.

What are you on about? Apple collects substantially less data about their users than anyone else.

They have cryptographic proof of what types of devices you’re on. There’s a lot of metadata that they have access to because of their closed ecosystem.