App Store and Play Store clean up: 592,000 apps removed in Q2
In the second quarter of 2022 alone, Overall, Apple and Google excluded nearly 600,000 apps abandoned or considered shady by their respective application stores: these are not official figures, but estimates by Pixalate, a company specializing in cybersecurity that has been dealing with this particular type of statistics for some time. The exact figure is 592,000 apps, almost three times that removed in the first quarter of the year (220,000) Some additional interesting figures:
- 64% of apps removed from Apple’s App Store were out of date for more than 2 years.
- 20% of the apps removed from the Google Play Store were not updated for more than 2 years.
- Apple eliminated 8,652% more apps than in the first quarter of the year. It is not a mistake, it is eight thousand: in Q1 Apple had removed only 5,000 apps, again according to the data held by the source.
- There has been a nearly 100-fold increase in the number of apps removed from the “health and fitness” section of the App Store. These included 178 apps in the family planning sub-category, which had combined download counts of over 1.5 million.
The five most popular apps removed for both platforms
- Over 49,000 of the apps removed in this period were designed for children.
- 35 apps belonging to or attributable to Sberbank, a company controlled by the Russian government and subject to sanctions, have been eliminated between the App and Play Store.
- Overall, all the apps removed had over 117 million ratings.
- 82% of the apps removed did not indicate the country of origin or the registered office of the company that owned them.
It is important to point out that when an app is excluded or deleted from the Play Store and App Store it is not necessarily entirely deleted: it can still remain available for use by those who have installed it on their device, and in the case of Apple it can still be downloaded. It can happen that apps are completely deleted, but it only happens when they pose security risks. Pixalate does not specify if and how many deleted apps were also deleted.
