In an effort to solve the problem of zombie applications, Google and Apple have removed a huge amount of apps from their respective market catalogs. In the second quarter of 2022, the two companies have totaled more than 592,000 applications.
The data covers a heterogeneous group of applications: some are not updated for many years, and were actually abandoned by their own developers; other apps have been removed for reasons of: safetyfor example, because they did not comply with the policies of the two stores or because they contained dangerous or fraudulent content.
Nearly 600,000 applications are not few, especially when you consider that Apple and Google limited themselves to removing 220,000 in the first quarter of 2022, which is less than half.
The vast majority of removed applications belonged to the category of so-called zombie apps: that is, software that has not had a single update for more than two years. Updates are important both because they make the app work well with the latest versions of operating systems, and because they improve user security by removing any exploits and vulnerabilities. A whopping 64% of apps removed from the Apple App Store hadn’t been updated for at least two years.
Cumulative, applications removed from google And Apple they had gained over 172 million views over the years. A small minority of the apps removed — 35 — were linked to Russian bank Sberbank, recently the subject of sanctions against Russia passed after the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
Source: Lega Nerd
