Apple Will Soon Tidy up the App Store by Deleting All Broken and Abandoned Apps
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Starting Sept. 7, Apple will be cleaning house ahead of the release of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra.
On Sept. 1, Cupertino sent an email to the Apple developer community stating that, next week, it would start deleting apps that are broken or are no longer being maintained, according to TechCrunch. This move will hopefully tighten up the App Store’s selection and make it easier for users to find better quality and regularly maintained apps for their devices, ARS Technica reported.
And it’s about time they did some tidying up. As of June 2016, Apple said there were over 2 million apps for the iPhone and iPad that have been downloaded a total of 130 billion times. But, as TechCrunch points out, many of these apps are broken, or have never been downloaded before.
Apple hasn’t currently announced any criteria it will use to identify broken or unmaintained apps, other than “implementing an ongoing process of evaluating apps for … issues, notifying their developers, and removing problematic and abandoned apps.” It’s worth noting that people who have already downloaded these apps in the past will still have the ability to redownload them from the App Store if the app is deleted from their phone.
If an app is flagged, the developers will be given a notification and 30 days to update the app before it’s removed. Once it’s deleted from the App Store, however, the name of the app will still be associated with its corresponding developer account — and the name won’t be available for use by other app creators.
This move is launching alongside a series of other improvements Apple is making to the App Store, according to their website. These changes include a 50-character cap to future app submissions — intended to curb the flow of apps that have long, keyword-laden names meant to improve search rankings, ARS Technica reported.
Apple will start reviewing and deleting apps on Wednesday, Sept. 7 — the same day that Apple is likely to reveal its new iPhone at an announcement event.
