Apple Mistakenly Pays Chinese Developers 7 Times Their Income

On September 4, Chinese iOS software developer under the username @waylybaye shared his story on Weibo, saying that Apple had mistakenly given him a seven-fold pay raise. And, it seems, like he was not the only one.

When sending money to developers in China, Apple usually converts US dollars into Chinese yuan, but this time things didn’t go as planned. The company mistakenly transferred dollars, resulting in a dramatic increase in Chinese developers’ income.

“The seven-fold foreign currency is already in my account and can be declared, but I don’t dare to touch it… Does anyone know how to deal with situations like these?” Weibo-blogger @waylybaye wrote, expressing his confusion.

Pandaily contacted several Chinese developers, but none of them encountered the same situation.

While spending the money might lead to legal repercussions, spending the part of the sum that corresponds to the original salary might also seem unnerving without instructions from Apple.

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The company has not officially responded to the matter. And it is still unclear whether Apple has really recovered some of the developers’ faulty payments.

For a big international company like Apple, the sum they may have lost on the mistake is laughably small. If Apple decides against taking the excess money back, it could potentially be a good marketing opportunity to incentivize more developers to contribute to Apple’s software ecosystem.