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One Million Less Play Store Apps in Four Years

One Million Less Play Store Apps in Four Years

The number of mobile apps you can download from Google’s Play Store has fallen by one million units in the past four years.

 

In March of this year, the Google Play Store counted 2,591,578 applications. That’s a 28 percent drop from the 3.6 million apps offered by the store in March 2018. The decline is mainly due to Google’s regular cleanup of applications that violate the Play Store rules.

“Google, therefore, must protect its users from malicious apps,” said Edith Reads of TradingPlatforms.com. “The Play Store is teeming with apps that can disrupt the proper functioning of smartphones and tablets. Some may even compromise the safety of users who download them. This reality makes such cleanups inevitable.’

Google takes a two-pronged approach to verifying compliance with its download store terms. First, since 2015, the company has been using a combination of human evaluators and AI tools to detect malicious or non-compliant apps. Applications that seriously violate the terms will then be banned from the Play Store.

Even though one million apps were banned in four years, the Google Play Store is still the world’s largest download store, with 2.6 million applications. The second place is for the Apple App Store, with more than 2.3 million applications.

Other stores are also competing for market share. For example, the Amazon App Store now has about 500,000 applications on offer, and Tencent’s download store (mainly aimed at the Chinese market) houses almost 44,000 applications.

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