Nearly 1.5 million applications could disappear from the App Store and Google Play

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TL:DR

• Apple is set to remove many of these applications soon.
• On the Google Play Store, applications that are older than 2 years have started to disappear from search results.
• Only 28% of the apps on the App Store and Google Play Store have been updated recently.

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The great purge is coming soon at Apple

According to the Pixalate report, the App Store has about 650,000 applications that have not been updated for more than two years. If Apple has not yet removed them, it is probably because they don’t threaten users’ personal data and are still functional on its new devices and iOS. The last mass purge from the App Store happened in 2016, where more than 150,000 apps bid adieu to the iPeople!

Back in April, several developers were up in arms on Twitter over an email sent by the Cupertino firm with the title “Application Improvement Notice”. This email warned that the company would remove applications that have not been “updated for a long time” from the App Store without providing any further details.

2 years of maximum reprieve on the Play Store

Things are not all that rosy on Android, either. Nearly 869,000 apps are on the chopping block on the Play Store. Google’s policy is clearer: if an app has not been updated for two years, it will not appear in the Play Store search results. However, Android users will be able to find their “old apps” elsewhere and download them from alternative stores.

The Pixalate report also indicated that only 28% of the apps on the App Store and Google Play Store have been updated over the past six months. The most downloaded apps happen to be among them, which makes perfect sense. 84% of the apps with more than 100 million downloads have been updated in the last 6 months.

This means the risk of your favorite application being deleted overnight is relatively low. Do you have any Play Store or App Store relics on your smartphone that are in danger of being deleted?