Sensor Tower: in December, Apple removed almost 50 thousand games from the Chinese App Store

Apple continued large-scale blocking in the Chinese App Store. Rumors about this appeared at the beginning of last December, and by the end of the month 48 thousand games had disappeared from the store at once.

The last cleaning was confirmed by Sensor Tower analysts. Moreover, according to their data, out of 48 thousand applications deleted in December, 40 thousand were removed from the App Store in just one day. So far, this is the largest removal from the Chinese version of the store.

Recall: the rules of China require that all mobile games before release and operation receive permission from the State Administration for Press and Publications (SAPP). If earlier Apple allowed developers to bypass this requirement, then last year the company’s policy changed — due to the lack of a ratification number (ISBN), the application began to face removal from the App Store.

The deadline for obtaining a license was initially called July 2020 by the Apple company, but then it postponed it to the end of December. That’s just the first blockages began much earlier.

Sensor Tower estimated that 2.5 thousand games left the Chinese App Store in the first week of July. By the end of July, another 5.5 thousand applications had disappeared from the store. In August — more than 27 thousand. In autumn — 37.4 thousand.

Dynamics of game deletions from the Chinese App Store
In total, remote projects from 2012 to 2020 collected almost $3 billion in revenue and 4.8 billion downloads in China.

It is also known that one of the games, released in 2019 and deleted last December, earned $85.5 million in the App Store.

Among the most famous blocked projects were Asphalt 8 from Gameloft, Fruit Ninja from Halfbrick, Hole.io from Voodoo and Hay Day from Supercell.