Millions of Android applications have disappeared from the Play Store this year, and for a good reason

If you have the impression that the Google Play Store looks a little less crowded these days, you do not imagine it. A major cleaning in the past year has reduced almost half of the applications on the Android market, according to the new data shared by the Intelligence Pottage app. (H / t: Techcrunch))

At the beginning of 2024, Google Play hosted around 3.4 million applications worldwide. Quick advance until today, and this number fell to around 1.8 million, which represents a drop of 47%. Appfigures stressed that this was not part of a broader trend in the industry either. The Apple App Store, for example, has increased a slight increase in applications during the same period, from 1.6 million to 1.64 million applications.

So what’s behind the narrowing game store? Everything dates back to July 2024, when Google decided to tighten its policies around the quality of applications. At the time, Google announced that it would begin to prohibit not only broken applications that crushed or refused to open, but also applications which offered “features and limited content”. This meant erased static applications without real functionalities, applications that simply displayed a PDF file, applications that offered only one wallpaper and applications that seemed to do nothing at all.

For years, the process of examining Google lighter applications, often based on automated checks and malware analyzes instead of a practical human review, has led the flooded Play Store of low quality applications. Meanwhile, Apple has long applied stricter standards before authorizing applications on its platform. By increasing the bar, Google aims to facilitate the search for high quality applications without having to browse the scams, spams or abandoned projects.

Talk to TechcrunchGoogle has confirmed that the most difficult rules, as well as the stricter verification of developers, compulsory tests for new accounts and enlarged human criticisms, played an important role in the sharp decline. The company also underlined wider efforts made in 2024, including AI tools for the detection of threats, stronger confidentiality protections and improved developer tools.

All these measures seem to bear fruit. Google says that it blocked 2.36 million applications that violated Play Store policies even before their launch, and prohibit more than 158,000 accounts of developers linked to harmful behavior.

There are also a few other factors at stake. In February, a new rule of the European Union forced developers to publicly list their names and addresses in the application lists, or may be struck off on the EU markets. However, Apple faced the same requirement and still managed to develop its application catalog, which suggests that Google’s internal cleaning has had a much more important impact.

Interestingly, Appfigures noted that the number of applications of the Play Store had already started to decrease before official repression last summer, although it remains a little difficult. Despite this, there are signs that the development of Android applications remains healthy: 10,400 new applications have already been launched on the Play Store this year, up 7.1% compared to the same era last year.

Less applications may seem disturbing at first glance, but for users and developers of Android, this could actually mean a better game store experience. With less spam and size to navigate, finding quality applications could finally become a little easier.