Bitcoin Magazine

Craig Raw Built One of Bitcoin’s Best Wallets for Free. Apple Might Kill It by June 30.

Craig Raw is a solo developer based in South Africa. In 2020, he built Sparrow Wallet — a free, open-source Bitcoin desktop wallet — because he thought the existing options weren’t good enough. 

He has no company behind him, charges nothing for the software, and has kept building it for six years on the belief that it has value for people who want real control of their money.

Sparrow is a tool for people who take Bitcoin self-custody seriously — the kind of users who want to see every detail of what their wallet is doing, manage their own transaction privacy, and hold their own keys rather than trust a third party. 

Raw designed it to educate as much as to function, building in tool tips, UTXO visibility, and transaction detail that most wallets hide from users. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. There is no mobile version, and Raw has been clear about that for years.

That last point is now at the center of a fight with Apple that could end his ability to ship software on Mac entirely.

Since 2023, fraudsters have published more than a dozen fake “Sparrow Wallet” apps on the App Store, according to Raw.

These apps impersonate Raw’s software. When a user enters their seed phrase — the master key to a Bitcoin wallet — the app sends it to the attacker and the funds disappear. Raw holds registered US trademarks for the Sparrow name and logo. 

He has reported the fakes to Apple and warned the community since early 2024. Users have contacted him after losing their savings, in some cases their life savings. Apple has removed some fakes. More keep appearing.

Raw’s test for Apple

Raw tried something different. He submitted a placeholder app to the App Store — never published, no functionality — whose only purpose was to display a message: Sparrow is desktop-only, any mobile app claiming to be Sparrow is not his, do not trust it.

Apple rejected the app for being placeholder content. Then it escalated. Raw’s entire Apple Developer account is now flagged for termination, with a deadline of June 30. The stated reason: “dishonest activity.”

In other words, the man trying to warn users about fraudulent apps has been charged with dishonesty by the platform those apps live on.

What makes this more than a bureaucratic frustration is what an Apple Developer account actually does. Sparrow is not sold through the Mac App Store — Raw distributes it from his own website. 

But macOS requires all apps to be signed with a valid Apple Developer certificate, or the system blocks them. If Apple kills his account, the certificate dies with it. New installs of Sparrow on Mac fail. Existing users stop receiving updates.

Raw posted about the situation on X on Monday, writing that he is “confident this is an automated misclassification that Apple would reverse on review,” but that he may be terminated before a human ever looks at his appeal. The June 30 deadline is one week away.

If Apple follows through, users lose access to updates, new installs fail, and the door opens wider for the fakes Raw has spent two years trying to stop. Raw is asking people to repost his thread.

Source: BitcoinMagazine