In April, there were two million globally-available apps on the iOS App Store. In July, that number dropped by about 420,000 apps to 1.6 million, according to app analytics company Appfigures.
Why?
Privacy. Or, lack of updating to comply with Apple’s recent App Tracking Transparency mandate in iOS 14.5 and iOS 15.
420,000 apps (not these ones) have disappeared from the App Store.
“The App Store grows at a pretty standard pace of 1% - 2% every month,” writes Appfigures CEO Ariel Michaeli. “In June, about a month after ATT rolled out, and after Apple's warning expired, 420,000 apps and games disappeared. That's a whopping 21% of the App Store. Gone. Just like that.”
ATT, or App Tracking Transparency, requires that every app ask people for permission to track them if the app publishers want to use device-level identifiers to measure marketing results or track people’s mobile behavior. Apple mandated its use as of iOS 14.5, and app developers had to update their apps to account for the new policy.
Some, however, clearly did not.
“Hundreds of thousands of developers didn't take ATT seriously or didn't care about their apps and games that were feeding 3rd parties party data enough to bother updating them,” says Michaeli.
That kind of decimation shows how serious Apple is about apps complying with its new policy requirements. It also is a reflection of the reality of app development, management, and operation.
That reality is cold and harsh: most apps get almost no attention and almost no downloads. They are essentially abandonware: unprofitable for the companies that built them to really maintain and grow, but left to essentially die on the App Store vine. Others are low-quality apps built by amateur mobile developers using low code or no code build-an-app services. They were either dropped hopefully on the App Store in anticipation of viral success or published like most self-published books: as proof of concept or a trophy of accomplishment.
In other words, almost nothing of real quality in active use by significant numbers of iPhone and iPad owners will have been deleted.
And Apple has essentially culled some of the brush, fallen limbs, and dead leaves from the floor of the app forest.
It is an interesting development as a result of ATT, however: most of our attention on the impact of that change has been with regard to the marketing and advertising industry. Clearly, there’s been additional impact.
“This should come as good news to active developers — there's less competition now,” Michaeli says.
