After early September promises that it would clean up shop, Apple is now purging its App Store of thousands of outdated and abandoned apps.
App intelligence firm Sensor Tower found that app removals increased by 238 percent in October 2016, primarily in the area of mobile games. Originally, Apple gave September 7th as the date it would begin tidying up the store — the day of the iPhone 7’s launch — but it appears large-scale removals only began seriously last month.
In total, 47,300 apps were removed from the App Store, a figure 3.4 times greater than the store’s average amount of monthly removals, which generally comes in at around 14,000 (based on numbers tracked beginning in January 2016).
Despite the cleanup, Sensor Tower notes that the App Store is still growing, and could balloon to more than double its current size by 2020, reaching about 5 million apps.
Apple also noted in September that it planned to impose more stringent naming guidelines that would see developers limiting the title of their app to 50 characters. Both changes are being made in an attempt to simplify search results.
[via]Tech Crunch, 9to5 Mac[/via]
