The great App Store purge is finally underway.
Apple warned developers in September that it plans to remove apps from its store that don’t meet quality standards of being “functional and up-to-date.” According to a new report, the deadline to meet those standards has passed and thousands of crummy apps are now being removed.
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Data from app-intelligence firm Sensor Tower reveals that app removals increased 238 percent in October.
Games took the brunt of the purge. Over 28 percent of apps removed were games. That’s no surprise given how many knockoff apps there are for iconic games like Flappy Bird and Candy Crush. Entertainment, Books, Education and Lifestyle apps also saw an increase in deletions.
Cleaning the App Store
About 47,300 apps were removed from the App Store in October, based on Sensor Tower’s data. That’s 3.4 times higher than the average of 14,000 apps that were deleted per month in 2016.
It’s not clear how long Apple’s purging campaign will last. The company has said it plans to remove apps that haven’t been update with compatibility improvements in a long time. That could be up to half of all apps, according to a previous Sensor Tower report that found 50 percent of apps haven’t been updated since May 2015.
