Google Play slashes app count by nearly half in quality overhaul

The Google Play Store has undergone a significant transformation, reducing its available apps by nearly 47% over the past year. Once home to approximately 3.4 million apps, the platform now hosts around 1.8 million, according to new data from app intelligence firm Appfigures.

This mass reduction, reported by TechCrunch, is not part of a glvobal app market trend—Apple’s App Store, by comparison, has seen a marginal increase in available apps during the same period. Instead, the sharp drop signals a targeted cleanup effort by Google aimed at improving user experience and developer visibility.

For years, the Google Play Store operated with relatively lax app review policies, favoring speed and scale over strict quality control. This led to a bloated marketplace filled with spammy, scammy, or barely functional apps. In contrast to Apple’s stricter human-led review system, Google relied more heavily on automated scans and shorter review windows.

In 2024, that philosophy began to shift. Google introduced higher quality standards, banning apps that lacked meaningful functionality—such as static apps, single-wallpaper apps, and other low-effort offerings. The company also cracked down on deceptive apps and significantly expanded human oversight to root out fraudulent behavior.

The cleanup campaign was bolstered by improvements in AI-powered threat detection, stronger privacy requirements, and new tools for developers. Google also made it mandatory for new personal developer accounts to undergo testing and verification. These combined efforts led to the rejection of 2.36 million policy-violating apps and the banning of over 158,000 developer accounts last year alone.

Although the European Union’s new “trader status” rule—requiring developers to publicly share their names and addresses—may have contributed to removals within the EU, Google did not cite it as a major factor. Apple, which enforced the same regulation, did not see a comparable decline.

Interestingly, Appfigures observed that the app count on Google Play began shrinking even before the purge formally started in mid-2024. Despite the downsizing, there are signs of healthy development activity: Google Play has seen over 10,400 new app releases so far in 2025, marking a 7.1% increase year-over-year.