221 thousand apps were removed from the App Store in six months. 59% of them did not comply with the privacy policy

In the first half of the year, the App Store has lost a lot of weight. The Pixalate platform found that about 221 thousand applications were missing from the store*. Almost two-thirds of them violated Apple‘s privacy rules.

*As Pixalate notes, it is unknown whether Apple removed these applications or the developers themselves removed them.

In total, there were 130.5 thousand privacy-violating applications in the store. This is 59% of the total number of remote projects. Pixalate did not explain the reason for the disappearance of the remaining 90.5 thousand.

More than half of all deletions occurred in the second quarter (April-June). Then 127 thousand apps disappeared from the App Store. Recall that it was in the second quarter that the new privacy policy officially started working on iOS. Nevertheless, it is impossible to directly link its launch with the cleaning of the store, since before Apple strictly ensured that applications did not violate user privacy. Every year, for this reason, the company did not let about 40% of projects into the store.

Note that 89% of the applications were intended for children 12 years and younger.

Applications were also removed outside the App Store. According to Pixalate estimates, from January to June 2021, 589 thousand applications disappeared from Google Play at once. This is five times more than previously reported.

25% of deleted Android apps also did not comply with the privacy policy. In addition, 66% of the projects had at least one “dangerous permit”. For example, 27% of them had access to GPS, and 19% had access to a camera.

As in the case of the App Store, more than half of the apps in the Play Store were deleted in the second quarter — 313.6 thousand.

86% of the removed applications were intended for children 12 years and younger.