Apple and Google delist 592,000 abandoned or fishy apps from respective app stores in Q2 2022

Abandonware… a nice little word for apps that have been neglected by their makers, not receiving any updates for a significant amount of time. Apple’s App Store, although it prides itself with being a very secure and strictly controlled place for people to get apps on iPhone, still has some of those old apps that may pose risks to users. Google’s Play Store also has some shady or abandoned apps. Now, a new report from fraud protection firm Pixalate on PR NewsWire shows that the companies have been bringing the hammer down on abandoned or shady apps. The two have collectively pulled a record 592,000 apps in the second quarter of this year from their respective app stores.

Apple and Google delist 592,000 abandoned or fishy apps

In the previous quarter, the two companies together delisted 220,000 such apps – the number this quarter is more than double this amount – 592,000 apps, according to the report from Pixalate.

For Apple, there’s an 8.652% increase in delisted apps from Q1 of this year. According to the report, 64% of the apps delisted by Cupertino had not been updated in at least two years. On top of that, Apple’s been cracking down on “Health & Fitness” apps, including at least 178 family planning apps.

Basically, all those apps had over 117 million user ratings before they got pulled from the two app stores. The majority of them, or precisely 82%, had no app country of registry. And, additionally, 35 of them were linked to Sberbank, which is a Russian-owned business.

By the way, the fact that Apple and Google have delisted those apps doesn’t mean that they have completely vanished. People who have downloaded them prior to the delisting will still have them on their iPhones or Android phones.

Pixalate states that prior to that massive cleaning (in the previous quarter, Q1 of 2022) Apple had delisted only 5,000 apps from the App Store.