Apple and Google ban on legacy apps will cut every store by a third

Both members of our beloved mobile duopoly, Google and Apple, recently announced plans to remove legacy apps from their app stores. Last month, both companies decided that any app that hasn’t been updated in two years will be removed. In early April, Google announced a two-year outage plan that would go into effect in November, and later that month, Apple began sending emails to developers giving them a 30-day notice to upgrade or remove. It’s hard to say what the rejected apps from two years ago will look like, so exactly how many apps are we talking about?

CNET has data from analytics firm Pixalate that says the two-year ban will result in 869,000 apps being removed from Google Play and about 650,000 from the App Store. That’s about a third of the current total app selection in each store. These figures mean that Google Play will change from 2.6 million apps to 1.7 million apps, and the App Store from 1.95 million apps to 1.3 million.

This Google number is an estimate, as Google has officially stated that the deadline is two years. Apple has not publicly specified a cutoff point. The company only personally emailed developers saying it was removing apps that “haven’t been updated in a significant amount of time,”but some developers put that date at two years.

Both app store owners have a strong case for this – older apps are of lower quality and more prone to exploits. Many developers say that this approach will lead to collateral damage. Not every app from two years ago is broken. Not every application in the world is a live service that will be constantly updated, and this model does not work for a free project. Android users will always have downloadable and alternative app stores, but Apple users will lose access to uninstalled apps.