The Cupertino company has cleaned up the App Store and removed more than 440,000 applications that have not been updated for three years.
Apple has carried out its threat: it has just deleted nearly 440,000 applications from its App Store. This is revealed by the study published by Pixalate, even though the Californian company had, a few months ago, given an ultimatum to developers to force them to update their old applications. An increase of 8,652% compared to the first quarter when Apple had removed only 5,000 applications considered obsolete. Of the apps removed, 64% hadn’t seen any updates in the past two years.
Among other interesting statistics, Pixalate tells us that nearly 95% of the applications removed by Apple did not include any conditions of use. In addition, almost a third of these applications did not embed information related to the privacy policy. However, since the end of 2020, this has forced developers to be transparent by clearly indicating the personal data to which their applications access.
Apple issued an ultimatum to developers
Obviously having very little taste for antiques, the Cupertino company had sent an e-mail to warn the developers concerned that applications that had not been updated for a long time would be removed from the App Store. At the time, Apple gave developers around 30 days to comply, otherwise their old apps would be expelled from the app store.
This threat had also created an outcry, especially among game developers, who considered it legitimate to have no update to offer for a work completed and still perfectly functional under iOS.
A few days later, faced with the concern aroused by his message, Apple published a press release explaining the reasons for his choice. Tim Cook’s company recalled in particular that since the implementation of its App Store improvement program launched in 2016, it had already deleted some 2.8 million applications deemed obsolete. For the sake of appeasement, Apple had however conceded to extend the duration of its ultimatum: the developers finally had 90 days before them (against 30 initially), to update their applications.
The Pixalate study does not just mention the case of Apple. She also looks at the case of Google and the Play Store. But the American giant has apparently been a little less severe than Apple during this second quarter: the Mountain View firm has only banned 153,000 applications from its store.
Source :
AppleInsider