Tech: Apple Reportedly Pulled Down 58,000 Apps From China App Store, Includes 33% Cloned Gaming Apps

Apple has been on its App Store clean up act since October last year, where it suddenly pulled down 50,000 apps at the time. This time the focus is on China as Apple has reportedly pulled down an even bigger chunk of apps, totalling 58,000, from its Chinese App Store.


While Apple seems to be on a spree against developers, the Cupertino giant is basically taking down clone and unsupported apps from its App Store as part of a much-awaited hygiene process.

According to People.cn, Apple pulled down 58,000 apps in just two weeks. While the move appears to be one related to hygiene, Chinese app developers claim otherwise.

33.5 percent of the apps removed were games. This isn’t surprising, given the high number of clone apps or template apps on the App Store. These would be apps that were be apps built using set templates.

On 15 June this year, Apple pulled down 22,000 apps from its crowded Chinese App Store. While users will be more than happy to see fewer sub-par apps show up in their search results, it’s the developers in China who are unhappy at the moment. They see the move as a counterattack by Apple on Tencent, where Apple came under fire for taking 30 percent of donations from Chinese social network apps, including WeChat, which is owned by Tencent. ASO 100, a Chinese data analytics company dismissed those claims that Apple did not take down any of these apps, nor targeted them in particular during the last purge. The company said that it was routine for Apple to do the same.

The need for the removal of apps from the App Store came from the fact that there are thousands of clone apps, abandoned apps and even problematic ones that make their way into search results, reducing the overall quality of apps available. An earlier report by TechCrunch, revealed renewed guidelines with a focus on abandoned apps that have not been updated for years. There are some apps that have never been downloaded in years. Adding to this, a number of apps will soon be taken down due to the lack of 64-bit support, those that have been ignored by developers for years. The lack of 64-bit support is indeed a big deal for Apple as the company’s OS 11 mobile software will see an App Store devoid of 32-bit apps. Apple has been sending out subtle warnings in the past coaxing developers to upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit instruction sets to avoid being taken down in the near future.