Apple may remove nearly 3,000 apps that have not been updated for a long time

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IT House April 27 news, application intelligence company Sensor To we In a recent cleanup aimed at removing apps no longer updated by their developers, 3,000 or more semi-active apps could be pulled from the App Store, according to a new estimate from r.

There was news this weekend that Apple It’s doing a big cleanup of its app store, mainly to clean up apps that haven’t been updated in a long time, Google Earlier, it was also announced that its Play Store would start blocking downloads of expired apps.

IT House has learned that in the past few days, some iOS developers have said on social media that they have been notified by Apple that their old apps will be removed from the App Store within 30 days if they do not submit an update.

A Sensor Tower analysis of apps with at least 10,000 installs in 2022 found that about 2,966 apps and games could face removal in Apple’s latest cleanup because they were last updated before or during 2018. But according to a rumoured developer report, some people say their apps have been updated recently and they’re still getting Apple’s warning notifications. This suggests that the true number of affected applications may be higher.

In its communications with developers, Apple simply informs them that if their apps have not been updated for a “considerable period of time,” they will be removed, but Apple did not specify how long they will be removed without an update. .

Often, these app store cleanups are driven by consumer demand. But complaints from affected developers suggest they view their app as a finished project that doesn’t necessarily need constant updates, resembling a work of art. They argue that some of the cleaned up apps and games are still available and playable.

One developer Semen Gjermundsen on Twitter Twitter complained that his children’s gaming app, Motivoto, was taken down, but it was still “fully usable” and called the policy an “unfair barrier to indie developers.” Motivoto’s last update was in March 2019, more than three years ago.

In Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines (section 2.5.1), the company tells developers that apps must only use public APIs, and that developers must keep “apps up-to-date.” More specifically, the guide instructs developers to “ensure that you phase out any deprecated features, frameworks, or technologies that are no longer supported in future OS releases.”

While Apple may not enforce this guideline for long, it has continued to do so on a semi-regular cadence over the years. For example, a few years ago, Apple phased out support for 32-bit apps and then removed those apps from App Store searches. In 2016, Apple also targeted outdated apps in a similar App Store cleanup. After a major crackdown on outdated apps, spam and cloned apps in 2017, Apple’s App Store size even shrank for the first time.

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