App Store Shrank for First Time in 2017
Sarah Perez (Hacker News, MacRumors):
The App Store shrank for the first time in 2017, according to a new report from Appfigures. The report found the App Store lost 5 percent of its total apps over the course of the year, dropping from 2.2 million published iOS apps in the beginning of the year to 2.1 million by year-end.
Google Play, meanwhile, grew in 2017 — it was up 30 percent to more than 3.6 million apps.
Appfigures speculated the changes had to do with a combination of factors, including stricter enforcement of Apple’s review guidelines, along with a technical change requiring app developers to update their apps to the 64-bit architecture.
Android developers kept busy, and in the last year alone released more than 1.5 million new apps. This is an increase of about 17% year over year, the largest jump since 2014. iOS developers on the other hand, took their time releasing just 755k new apps in 2017. That’s a big drop! 29% to be precise, the first drop since the App Store launched in 2008.
[…]
More than twice as many iOS apps came to Android in 2017 than Android apps came into the App Store.
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
What that means is that Apple is curating its store.
How many Play Store apps are malware, crapwares, illegal clones of existing softwares, and other poorly coded and useless apps?
Not to says that there is no bad apps in the App Store, but the ratio is probably far to be the same.
@Jean-Daniel Do you have numbers to support the idea that there are less illegal clones on the App Store or poorly coded apps?
someone,
Yeah, there's some sketchy and crappy apps on the iOS store too....that's clearly true. I've used both. In addition to Ovi/Nokia (RIP), Windows, Amazon, Barnes and Noble (RIP), etc.
