Violet R.According to data presented by CasinosEnLigne.com, the number of downloads from Google Play and the App Store, the two largest mobile app distribution channels in the world, has dropped by two billion year-on-year.
Although the App Store is stronger in terms of revenue, the Google Play platform has always accounted for the majority in terms of app downloads. Last year, however, Google’s app store saw a significant decline in downloads. In fact, data from Sensor Tower, Statista and TechCrunch shows that Android users are behind the decline in downloads in 2022.
In 2018, 105.3 billion apps were downloaded globally from both app stores. A year later, that number jumped nearly 10% to 115.3 billion and continued to grow. The stats show that 2020 saw the biggest year-on-year increase, with the combined number of downloads from Google Play and the App Store rising 24% year-on-year to an impressive 143 billion.
After years of remarkable growth, the number of downloads almost stagnated in 2021, with the total number of downloads on the two app stores growing by just 0.7% year-on-year. What started as stagnation, however, has become the first annual decline in downloads this market has ever seen.
Last year, Android and iOS users worldwide made 142.1 billion downloads, down 1.4% from a year earlier. The statistics show that the number of downloads from the App Store increased by 100 million year-on-year, rising from 32.1 billion in 2021 to 32.2 billion in 2022. In contrast, the number of downloads from Google Play fell by 2.1 billion. In 2021, Android users worldwide made 112 billion downloads. Last year, that number fell to 109.9 billion.
But according to StatCounter, Android dominated the mobile OS market in Q4 2022 with a 71.8% share. That represents a 1.18% increase from its 70.62% market share in the same quarter a year ago. In contrast, iOS market share declined during this period. In Q4 2022, iOS had a 27.6% share of the mobile operating system market, down from 28.6% in Q4 2021.
Over one million apps removed from the Google Play Store in the first half of 2022
Google Play Store has significantly reduced the number of apps available since the beginning of 2022. According to data published by Sports Lens, more than one million apps were removed from it in the first half of the year. This is the second largest drop since 2018. It’s possible that the downfall of app downloads on Google Play is due to this.
Statistics show that the US tech giant removed 1.3 million apps from its store in the first quarter of this year alone, bringing the number of apps down to 3.3 million. However, the negative trend stopped in the second quarter, when the number of “apps” increased to 3.5 million. By comparison, the number of apps in Apple’s App Store rose from 2 to nearly 2.2 million in the first half of the year.
Abandoned apps are piling up on Google Play and the App Store
Google Play and the App Store publish hundreds to thousands of new apps every day, yet both portals are accumulating “abandoned” apps. These are titles that have not been updated for the last two years, which is a sure indicator that no one cares about app maintenance anymore. A specific case are the ‘super-abandoned’ apps that have not been updated for the last five years. In both cases, installing these titles is a major security risk.
Google Play holds the record for the most abandoned apps in the second quarter of this year, with around 1.1 million abandoned apps. There are “only” 500,000 on AppStor. Quarter-on-quarter, Google reports a 16 percent increase, while Apple reports a 29 percent decrease. If we’re talking about long-abandoned apps, these are almost the same numbers. On Google Play, it concerns 166 thousand titles, on the App Store it is 141 thousand apps.
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