Half the Google Play Store apps just disappeared – here’s why

Huge crackdown on scam Android apps.

- JON MUNDY reports

Google has been purging apps from its Android app store, with around half culled in the past year.

A new report from TechCrunch (tinyurl.com/362r85su, using figures from Appfigures) notes that, from the start of 2024 to today, the Google Play Store dropped from 3.4 million apps worldwide to around 1.8 million apps.

That's a loss of 47 percent of the apps available to Android users.

This isn't a general trend either, as Apple's iOS App Store library grew ever so slightly during the same time, from 1.6 million to 1.64 million apps.