The first half of the year passed for the editors of the Play Store in shock mode. She removed about 115 thousand apps from the app store. Such major purges have not happened in it since 2018.
Missing Games
This was reported by the SafeBettingSites portal, which studied the data of Google and the analytical companies Statista, App Annie and AppBrain. According to them, from January to April, more than 58 thousand applications disappeared from the Play Store. Moreover, only 4.5 thousand were fraudulent. In May, another 65 thousand applications disappeared from it, and in June — 4.3 thousand applications.
According to SafeBettingSites, the purge that took place was one of the biggest in Google’s history. The last major removal was in 2018, when the total number of applications decreased by 800 thousand (now 2.8 billion applications are available in the Play Store).
According to analysts, with the help of deletions, the company fights for the quality of the store. But not only by them. In April, Google announced that it would soon tighten the requirements for the names and icons of games in the Play Store. These rules should start working in the second half of 2021.
What requirements has Google introduced?
First of all, the new rules are designed to combat the “tinsel” on digital shelves. As Google explained, some developers mislead users with incorrect names and icons, trying to stand out among other applications in the store.
For example, they write adjectives like “best” and “free” in the name of the game. They also add similar notes to the icon.
Example of the correct designExample of incorrect design
Therefore, the company banned:
- make app names longer than 30 characters;
- use evaluation words in icons, names of games and developers themselves, which can be regarded as advertising;
- add emoticons or repeating punctuation marks to them (!!).
Separately, Google wrote that these requirements also apply to screenshots, videos and application descriptions. If the developer ignores the rules regarding them, then his game will be banned from being promoted in the Play Store.