App Store Subscription Billing Complaints: 2026 Dataset

Across 1,979 of the highest-grossing and highest-selling apps on the US App Store, we sampled the most recent 1–2★ reviews and counted what people were actually angry about. 26% of them were about billing — being charged after canceling, trials converting without notice, amounts that did not match what was advertised — rather than about the app's features or quality.

35,3311–2★ reviews sampled

9,261about billing (26%)

1,979apps covered

Method

Took the top-grossing and top-paid charts for 10 US App Store categories — Productivity, Utilities, Business, Health & Fitness, Education, Finance, Photo & Video, Lifestyle, Food & Drink and Travel — giving 1,979 distinct apps.
Pulled the most recent public customer reviews for each app and kept those rated 1 or 2 stars: 35,331 reviews across 1,576 apps that had reviews available.
Counted a review as a billing complaint when it mentions charges, refunds, cancellation, trials, auto-renewal or disputed amounts. Sampled September 2026.

Limitation: Apple's public feed returns a limited window of recent reviews per app, so counts are comparable between apps but are not totals for an app's whole history. Apps with no recent reviews in the feed show a count of zero.

What people complain about

The gap is not close. Billing complaints outnumber the next most common theme — crashes and bugs — by roughly five to one. The most frequent specific complaints are being charged after canceling, a free trial converting with no reminder, and being billed a yearly amount after signing up for a monthly plan.

Apps with the most billing complaints

Ranked by the number of recent 1–2★ reviews that mention billing.

Citing this

This dataset is free to cite and reuse with attribution.

RefundAppeal (2026). App Store Subscription Billing Complaints: 2026 Dataset.
Retrieved from https://refundappeal.com/data/

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