Apple is staying true to its word and is getting rid of the old and abandoned iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad apps that were available in the App Store. The company announced this in September and they have done it already.
The App Store contained about 47,300 apps that were either outdated, not compatible with new devices, do not meet required guidelines and not updated in a very long time. This is a very good thing, as sometimes users would download these outdated apps and it would either not work or keep crashing.
The App Store Clean-up
Data from a research firm called Sensor Tower, which was posted by TechCrunch, shows that there was an increase of 238 percent in apps being removed versus last month. The data suggested that most of the apps that Apple deleted were games and that constituted to about 28 percent of all the apps removed in October.
Games is probably the biggest category on the App Store, therefore, it makes sense that most of the removed apps were games. After Games, it was Entertainment and Books that saw about nine percent of apps removed. About seven percent of Education apps and six percent of apps in Lifestyle category were also deleted.
Apple has always been removing unwanted and non-functioning apps, but this is the biggest removal in a month ever, according to iDownloadblog. In October alone, the app removals were more than 3 percent higher than the monthly average.
Not An Easy Task
The App Store has over two million apps and around 100,000 new apps are being submitted every week. This is certainly not an easy job then, but Apple is doing it very well. The company also has to deal with the new iMessage app store introduced in iOS 10.
Developers were notified of the upcoming changes and asked to submit updates or newer versions of their apps. The deadline was Sep. 7, 2016, but Apple seemed to have extended it to give developers more time.
