Report: Google’s outdated app crackdown could hide nearly 900,000 apps in Play Store

Ben Schoon | May 16 2022 - 7:06 am PT

Google announced recently that it would purge the Play Store of outdated Android apps that didn’t support the platform’s latest features or had been neglected. According to a new report, Google’s crackdown will remove nearly 900,000 outdated Android apps from the Play Store.

Analyst firm Pixalate, via CNET, claims that Google and Apple combined will remove or hide upwards of 1.5 million apps from their respective app stores due to those apps having been neglected for at least two years.

Breaking down that data, the Google Play Store is claimed to house around 869,000 outdated Android apps that have not received any updates in the past two years. These “abandoned” apps, as Google previously explained, will be hidden from view in the Play Store, not showing in search results for any potential new users of those apps. Existing users of these apps will not be affected.

Google has yet to comment on this reported number.

This change to how the Play Store hosts apps is set to be implemented on November 1, 2022, giving developers quite a bit of time to push updates to their apps. Google specifies that apps need to target an API level with their apps from the past two years to avoid these changes. As of May 2022, that means targeting API level 29 at least, corresponding with Android 10. Currently, Android 12 and 12L comprise API levels 31 and 32, with Android 13 in beta testing for API level 33.

Apple, meanwhile, is apparently set to remove these outdated apps from its store entirely, per the reporting of at least one affected developer. The App Store apparently houses around 650,000 “abandoned” apps.