In recent times it was noticed that Apple and Google delisted a number of applications from its respective stores due to different reasons. As per the H1 2021 Delisted Apps report 59 percent of the delisted apps from the Apple store and 25 percent of the delisted apps from the Google Store did not have any privacy policy. On Google, 26 percent of the deactivated apps were from Russia and on Apple 60 percent of the delisted apps were from China and all of them did not have any privacy policy.
Moreover, 66 percent of the deactivated apps from Google had at least one ‘dangerous permission’ while 27 percent of the apps had access to GPS coordinates and 10 percent of them had access to the camera. In total there were more than 8,13,000 apps have 9 billion downloads and 86 percent of them had targeted children under the age of 12 or under. However, such apps have been removed from the stores.
More than five million apps were analyzed and the report was found that the security, consumer privacy and the brand safety of the advertisers could be at risk. However, the delisted apps could remain installed in the device of the consumers even after they have been removed from the app store. There are a number of reasons, the apps could be delisted for instances app store policy breaches, developer withdrawal. But the report has not mentioned about any reason or any delisting action.
The initiator of the delisting is usually information that is not available publicly. This means that it is often possible that it could never be known if the removal was done by the developer or the app store. Nearly 5 million apps and app developers were delisted from the Apple App store and the Google Play Store, according to the data by Pixalate. The apps were analyzed from January 1 to June 30, 2021.
Photo Credits: Pixabay
