Craig Raw is a freelance producer based in South Africa. In 2020, he he built Sparrow Wallet – a free, open source Bitcoin desktop wallet – because they decided that the options available were not enough.
He doesn’t have a company behind him, he doesn’t pay anything for the program, and he’s been building it for six years in the belief that it has value for people who want to take real control of their money.
Sparrow it is a tool for those who take it Bitcoin to keep seriously – the type of user who wants to see everything their wallet is doing, manage their privacy, and own their keys instead of relying on someone else.
Raw created it to teach how to build, build tool guides, UTXO formats, and transaction details that most wallets hide from users. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux. There is no mobile version, and Raw has been sounding great for years.
The latter point is now in the middle of a fight with Apple that will end its ability to ship software on the Mac entirely.
Since 2023, fraudsters have published more than a dozen fake “Sparrow Wallet” apps on the App Store, according to Raw.
These programs emulate Raw programs. When the user enters their seed password – the main secret of the Bitcoin wallet – the program sends it to the attacker and the money disappears. Raw owns US registered trademarks for the Sparrow name and logo.
He has reported fakes to Apple and warned the community since early 2024. Users have contacted him after losing their money, sometimes their life savings. Apple has removed some false positives. More information continues to emerge.
Apple’s Raw Test
Raw tried something different. They submitted an application with a location to the App Store – unpublished, not working – which was intended to convey a message: Sparrow is desktop only, any mobile application that claims to be Sparrow is not its own, don’t trust it.
Apple rejected the app due to space limitations. Then it grew. All Apple Developer Raw accounts are now set to be suspended, with a deadline of June 30. The reason: “fraudulent activities.”
In other words, a person who is trying to warn users about fraudulent software has been accused of dishonesty by the platform on which the software resides.
What makes this frustrating is what the Apple Developer account does. Sparrow is not sold through the Mac App Store – Raw distributes it on its own website.
But macOS requires all apps to be signed with an official Apple Developer certificate, or the system blocks them. If Apple kills his account, the certificate dies with it. New installation of Sparrow on Mac failed. Existing users will stop receiving updates.
Raw has been sent about what happened to the X on Monday, he writes that he “believes that this is a mistake that Apple will correct in the review,” but that it may be resolved before someone looks at his request. The June 30 deadline is one week away.
If Apple follows through, users won’t be able to get updates, new installs will fail, and the door will be open for Raw fakes to spend two years trying to stop it. Raw is asking people to repost his thread.
ALL: On June 23, Craig Raw wrote on Twitter that Apple changed its decision to terminate its construction account after a successful appeal, although he said that the fake Sparrow Wallet apps remain on the App Store and continue to put users’ money at risk.
