Apple makes a clean sweep: over 500,000 apps from the App Store disappear. The number of apps available on the App Store has dropped to its lowest level in 7 years.
Apple recently removed over half a million apps from the App Store , the official iOS marketplace. The data refers to the last quarter. Apple, like Google, periodically cleans up its store, deleting malicious, poor quality or simply ‘ zombie apps ‘ applications.
Namely: apps that have been abandoned by their developers and therefore no longer receive updates for a long time. Precisely these systematic cleaning operations have meant that the number of apps available on the App Store has dropped to the lowest levels in the last seven years.
During the last quarter, Apple removed 541,697 applications from its App Store. The data refers to a heterogeneous group of applications: some had not been updated for many years, and had been effectively abandoned by their own developers; other apps were removed for security reasons, for example because they didn’t comply with the policies of the two stores or because they included dangerous or fraudulent content.
The vast majority of the removed applications belonged to the category of so-called zombie apps: i.e. software that had not received any form of update for over two years. Updates are important, both because they allow the app to work correctly with the latest versions of operating systems and because they improve user security by removing any exploits and vulnerabilities.
