Are money making apps legit? What 4,000 recent App Store reviews say

Are money making apps legit? Most well-known ones are, in the sense that they do pay real people. But the star rating in the app store is a poor guide to what you'll experience. We read the 500 most recent written App Store reviews for eight popular reward apps, 4,000 reviews in all. Every one of them has a 4.2 to 4.75 star rating, yet their recent written reviews average between 2.5 and 3.8 stars. The most common complaint by far isn't low pay. It's trouble cashing out.

A note before the numbers: we run Vazpop, a rewards site, so we see how these apps work from the inside every day. None of them is ranked or recommended here. We publish the data so you can judge for yourself, and the method is at the bottom.

What 4,000 recent reviews say about eight reward apps

All reviews come from the US App Store, pulled on 12 October 2026. "Store rating" is the lifetime average Apple shows. "Recent average" is the average star score of the latest 500 reviews that included written text.

App	Store rating	Recent average	Recent 1 to 2 star	Most common complaint
Freecash	4.7 (152k)	3.8	30%	Cashing out (46% of bad reviews)
AttaPoll	4.6 (61k)	3.6	33%	Cashing out (28%), closed accounts (17%)
TesterUp	4.2 (75k)	3.4	35%	Cashing out (55%)
KashKick	4.7 (127k)	3.2	42%	Cashing out (32%)
JustPlay	4.7 (218k)	3.0	43%	Too many ads (34%)
Scrambly	4.75 (99k)	3.0	49%	Cashing out (28%), no reply from support (26%)
Mistplay (iPhone)	4.5 (64k)	2.6	55%	Cashing out (35%)
Cash Giraffe	4.6 (22k)	2.5	58%	Cashing out (27%), app crashes (16%)

Percentages in the last column are the share of that app's 1 and 2 star reviews that mention the issue. One review can mention several.

Are money making apps legit if their ratings are so high?

This is not, by itself, proof of anything shady. Two normal things push lifetime ratings up:

• Apps choose when to ask you for a rating. Apple lets apps show its standard rating prompt up to three times a year, at a moment the app picks, as its ratings and reviews guidance explains. A reward app will naturally ask right after a payout, when you're happiest. Those quick star taps rarely come with text.
• Angry people write. Someone whose $40 cashout was refused types a paragraph. Someone who got $3 on time mostly doesn't.

So the truth sits somewhere between the two numbers. What the gap does tell you is useful: the store rating describes the average happy moment, and written reviews describe what happens when something goes wrong. Before you put weeks into a game offer, the second one matters more.

The reviews are also very split. Across all eight apps, most reviews were either 1 star or 5 star, with few in between. People seem to either get paid smoothly or hit a wall. Very few find these apps "just okay".

The written reviews tell you what happens when things go wrong, which the star average can't. Photo by Darya Ezerskaya on Unsplash.

The five things that go wrong most

1. The cashout doesn't arrive, or is refused

This was the top complaint for seven of the eight apps. The stories repeat: a payout stuck on "pending" for days, a cashout declined "for violating terms" without saying which term, or an ID check that failed and locked the account. It peaks right when people try to cash out bigger amounts after a long game offer.

What helps: cash out early and small the first time, even if it's just the minimum. It tests the whole path (ID check, payment details, review) while little is at stake.

2. Support doesn't answer

"Emailed them six times" is practically its own genre. It showed up in 12% to 29% of bad reviews, depending on the app. A slow reply is annoying. No reply turns a fixable tracking problem into lost money.

3. Progress didn't track

Game offers depend on the advertiser's tracking telling the app you hit level 30. When that fails, the reward never shows. Our guide to making money playing games on your phone covers how to give tracking the best chance, and why screenshots of your progress are worth taking.

4. Accounts closed with a balance in them

AttaPoll (17%) and Scrambly (13%) had the most reviews about suspended or disabled accounts. Some reviewers admit to things that break the rules, like making new accounts. Others say they were travelling or simply don't know why. Every reward app checks for VPNs, shared devices and duplicate accounts, and those checks sometimes catch innocent people. Never use a VPN, and don't share a phone with someone who uses the same app.

5. Ads and tiny pay

JustPlay stood out here: 34% of its bad reviews were about ads, and 27% about pay being too low for the time. Its business is its own ad-supported games, so this is part of the deal, not a bug.

How to check any money making app before you trust it

1. Read the 1 star reviews from the last month, not the average. In the App Store, open Ratings and Reviews and sort by Most Recent.
2. Find the cashout rules in writing. Minimum, fees, ID check and how long holds last. If you can't find them before signing up, that's your answer.
3. Make your first cashout tiny. If the minimum is $5 or less, cash out the first $5 before starting anything long.
4. Never pay to earn. Some offers ask for purchases or deposits. Only do those if you'd want the thing anyway.
5. Use two apps, not five. You'll reach each minimum faster, and if one goes wrong you haven't lost everything.

If you want help choosing, we compare apps in sites like Freecash, KashKick vs Freecash, is Scrambly legit, is TesterUp legit, Cash Giraffe vs Mistplay and JustPlay vs Mistplay.

How we did this

We pulled the 500 most recent reviews with written text for each app from Apple's public US customer reviews feed on 12 October 2026. Because some apps get far more reviews than others, the time span differs: Freecash's 500 covered just over a week, while Cash Giraffe's stretched back more than a year. We then sorted the 1 and 2 star reviews into themes using keyword rules (for example "suspended", "banned" or "deactivated" for closed accounts) and checked samples by hand. Keyword sorting is rough, so treat the percentages as a guide to what people talk about, not exact counts. Mistplay figures are for its iPhone app, which launched in the US in 2025 and runs separately from the Android version. Vazpop isn't included because it runs in the browser rather than as an App Store app.