New Delhi: The recent crackdown on old apps by Apple App Store and Google Play Store will result in the removal of almost one-third of the abandoned apps from the marketplaces. According to a new report, as many as 1.5 million or 15 lakh apps on both App Store and Play Store have not been updated in two years or more and are at risk of being removed in the wake of the new policy changes by Apple and Google.
According to data from the analyst firm Pixalate, as many as 869,000 apps from Google Play Store and almost 650,000 from the Apple App Store could be removed -- which is about a third of each play store's total app count. Those numbers would have Google Play changing from 2.6 million apps to 1.7 million apps and the App Store from 1.95 million apps to 1.3 million.
While Google will hide from view the apps that have not been updated in two years on the Google Play Store and they will not appear in search results, Apple's policy would remove the apps altogether from the App Store.
The iPhone maker started emailing developers some time back and gave them almost a month's notice to update apps on the App Store or be removed. This development came soon after Google, in April, added a new mandate for app developers and according to that if they stop do not update the apps, Play Store will hide them and prevent users from downloading them.
"Today, as part of Google Play’s latest policy updates, we are taking additional steps to protect users from installing apps that may not have the latest privacy and security features by expanding our target level API requirements," Krish Vitaldevara, Director, Product Management, Google, had written in a blog post.