Freecash is back on Google Play as of yesterday, three weeks after both stores pulled it at the same time.
Apple still hasn’t moved though, but the Almedia team shared they’re “continuing to work with Apple on iOS reinstatement”, so the door isn’t fully closed.
Same app, same business model.
Two platforms and potentially two very different conclusions.
Before we get into what that means practically, let’s roll back to what actually happened.
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If you work in mobile gaming, you already know Freecash isn’t a scam. The model is familiar as rewarded UA platforms have been part of the stack for years. You’ve either bought traffic from Almedia, competed with them, or know people who do.
What happened wasn’t a compliance review. It all really went down when TechCrunch wrote a piece on the app, and contacted Apple for comment. Apple gave no comments, however the app was gone the same day. Google followed 24 hours later.
That’s two platform safety teams deciding to remove an app from their stores just because of an article. The reputational cost of being associated with a TechCrunch scam story for 48 hours outweighs whatever due diligence would have found.
And of course it did not come from nowhere, and there’s whole background story. Matej Lancaric covered it well here. There was a first Freecash app that got removed from the store few years ago, then re-uploaded from a different developer account. There were also some deceptive affiliate TikTok ads, as well as a bad privacy label language from their legal team.
Long story short, it’s a company that scaled faster than its compliance infrastructure, operating in a category that runs on platform tolerance rather than proper guidelines.
So after few weeks of being removed from the stores, Google did the actual review and decided to put it back. Which is a good news for the whole category as it means that the business model is defensible. So now, let’s wait to see what Apple does next, as no one really knows what will happen.
What I do know though is that this is an uncomfortable precedent. A well-framed TechCrunch piece, with the right headline, contacting Apple for comment, is apparently sufficient to trigger the same-day removal of a top-5 app with 70M users..
Meanwhile: serious capital is moving in
While Freecash was fighting for reinstatement, major M&A moves landed in the same rewarded category:
Mistplay acquired MAF’s MyChips and Mobivity’s Connected Rewards
NCSOFT acquired a 70% stake in JustPlay for $202M, a Germany-based rewarded gaming platform
Nazara acquired Bluetile and BestPlay for $100M+
Hundreds of millions of dollars in acquisitions, all around the same time that the biggest rewarded app just got pulled from both stores. The market is clearly showing that the category isn’t going away.
The grey zone every studio is quietly navigating
This is where the Freecash story connects to the real decisions I’m seeing with clients right now, since I’m working with a couple of rewarded games studios.
There are essentially three positions a casual cash game can take:
Full rewarded. Title, subtitle, screenshots… all of it leans into earn/win/cash. The game’s organic appeal is secondary, the reward is the product. If you’re here, the earn mechanic IS the user proposition. Going halfway is worse than committing, because you get the policy surface area without the CVR payoff.
Generic game with a rewarded CPP/CSL layer. Default listing is a clean casual game, optimised for gameplay keywords and organic discovery. The rewarded positioning only surfaces through Custom Product Pages or Custom Store Listings served to audiences coming from paid ads. Better organic health, lower risks to go against guidelines, but you need a CPP built specifically for rewarded intent.
The hybrid trap. In my experience benchmarking competitors across the category, most apps actually sit here: some rewarded signals in default metadata, not enough to convert rewarded traffic well, but enough to attract policy scrutiny + potential crawlers, and not clean enough to rank on gameplay keywords either. This is where most portfolios end up when nobody made a deliberate decision. It’s the worst of both options and it’s extremely common.
One more layer: running UA for these games is genuinely complicated. Google Ads now classifies skill-based cash games under its full gambling advertising policy. The “clean game” default isn’t just safer on the store listing, but also for any UA efforts.
The Freecash situation has made both stores more attentive to rewarded-adjacent language right now, not less. Being in the hybrid trap at this specific moment is worse timing than usual.
The Apple guideline detail that actually matters
Apple’s 3.2.2(x) update from mid-2025 legitimised rewarded UA platforms: it permits incentivising users to take specific in-app actions. That’s the Freecash model, and Mistplay, JustPlay, the whole category.
But your casual cash game’s metadata leaning into “win real money” doesn’t sit under 3.2.2(x). Technically, it sits under 5.3: gambling, gaming, and lotteries. Completely different guideline sections, completely different enforcement logic. 3.2.2(x) is about rewarded UA platforms. 5.3 is about apps where gameplay outcomes are connected to real prize value.
In practice: a screenshot about the game is fine, a screenshot about prizes is fine, one that connects the two will get you rejected. So on iOS, keeping your default listing in “game” territory rather than “prize app” territory is the lower-risk path right now. The CPP handles the rewarded framing for the audiences where that context is already established, where your default metadata doesn’t have to do that work.
What to expect next
The platforms are going to have to make clearer decisions about this category. Not only because of Freecash, but because the market is becoming big enough to be clearly discussed. With hundreds of millions of dollars being invested, we can clearly say the category is institutionalising.
What that probably means for the future: clearer guidelines, stricter compliance requirements, and more structured approval processes for rewarded-adjacent apps. The vague tolerance that the category has operated on is increasingly hard to sustain when the company involved are publicly listed companies with investor relations obligations.
Google said yes to Freecash. Apple is still deciding. But the real question isn’t what happens to Freecash on iOS. It’s when will we get clearer guidelines on both platforms?