Apple Commences Massive App Store Purge, Removes over 47,000 Apps

Earlier this year in September, Apple vowed to clean its App Store of outdated, non-functional, and obsolete apps, giving developers a grace period to update their apps. That promised purge is now in progress, according to data that app intelligence firm Sensor Tower has shared with Techcrunch.

Sensor Tower has found that the amount of app deletions spiked by 238 percent in October, with 47,300 apps being removed during that month alone. By contrast, from the months of January to September, Apple deleted an average of 14,000 apps per month. 28 percent of all the apps that were deleted in October were games, which makes sense given that games represent the most popular and largest segment of the App Store.

The Entertainment and Books categories followed at 8.99 percent and 8.96 percent, respectively. The Education and Lifestyle categories also saw a significant amount of deletions, making up 7 and 6 percent of all removed apps, respectively.

Many of the deleted apps haven’t been updated and are considered “abandoned”. According to Apple, such apps “have not been supported with compatibility updates for a long time”, which means they won’t work with the newest iOS releases and iPhone generations.

Apple has begun the large-scale culling of the App Store that it advised it would do previously. Techcrunch reports that this is likely part of an ongoing effort to improve the App Store, meaning the purges will continue for the foreseeable future.

This won’t do much to shrink the App Store, though, given that Apple still receives close to 100,000 submissions per week.