They do have automated + manual reviews. I think the $99/yr developer account is what separates Google from Apple here, along with much stricter policy enforcement on the Apple side.
If your account gets banned and you lose $99 before the scam paid off it’s not worth your time.
If you want it to really stick make them buy a bond against in such a jurisdiction. After one party has been burned for their 10k they'll find their former partner exceedingly aggressive in recovering their money and none willing to do business.
Furthermore most of such abusive behavior is trivially recognizable based on dollar figures involved, behavior, organic reviews, complaints. In this day and age there isn't much excuse for a trillion dollar company not to have automated 99% of the situation and employ labor to handle the rest.
> That man’s name is Kosta Eleftheriou, and over the past few months, he’s made a convincing case that Apple is either uninterested or incompetent at stopping multimillion-dollar scams in its own App Store. He’s repeatedly found scam apps that prey on ordinary iPhone and iPad owners by luring them into a “free trial” of an app with seemingly thousands of fake 5-star reviews, only to charge them outrageous sums of money for a recurring subscription that many don’t understand how to cancel. “It’s a situation that most communities are blind to because of how Apple is essentially brainwashing people into believing the App Store is a trusted place,” he tells The Verge.
The fee is nothing.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/8/22272849/apple-app-store-s...
It takes a bit of effort even to get an app on public TestFlight on Apple’s side. Plus the fee, which is reasonable for a thorough review.
Anyways, I edited my comment to not misrepresent the Play Store process, thanks.
It's even more fun when it's a purely administrative thing like updating information in a link on your developer profile, but they make you upload a near identical binary, since the automation has kicked in again and they can't rereview an already submitted and rejected app.
Our app gets held up fairly regularly, I'm not sure why us in particular, but we have an app that requires our licensed service to use, quite often they'll muck up the registration process with the test accounts we provide (they're one-time) registration, and then hold up our app until we provide more test accounts for them to use.
They also recently took issue with some functionality of our app that they claim existed (but doesn't) and forced us to update our privacy policy to mention it so we can get it through. I know for a fact, said functionality doesn't exist, because I lead the team that builds the backend, but there was just no arguing with them.