Apple’s 2023 App Store Transparency Report (PDF)

One segment that caught my attention:

Apps removed from the App Store subject to government takedown demands: 1,462

By country or region:

  • China mainland: 1,285
  • South Korea: 103
  • India: 30
  • Russia 12
  • Indonesia: 8
  • Lithuania: 5
  • Ukraine: 5
  • Malaysia: 2
  • Mexico: 2
  • Philippines: 2
  • Thailand: 2
  • Türkiye: 2
  • Hungary: 1
  • Libya: 1
  • Pakistan: 1
  • Vietnam: 1

There are footnotes on the China and South Korea numbers. For China it says “There were 1,067 game apps removed for lack of a legally required GRN license.” That’s a 2020 law that requires a government license for any paid game. For South Korea, which one doesn’t think of as a repressive country, it says “There were 102 game apps removed for their inappropriate age rating”, which accounts for all but one of them.

A few other items:

  • Average weekly app downloads: 787,999,950
  • Average weekly app redownloads: 1,656,894,821

I long suspected users engage in frequent churn with certain apps installed on their phones, but this seemingly puts a number to it: redownloading previously installed apps is more than twice as popular as downloading new apps. But 788 million weekly app downloads is a big number.

  • Average weekly automatic app updates: 52,623,848,130
  • Average weekly manual app updates: 562,782,228

No surprise that automatic app updates dwarf manual updates, given that automatic updates have been the default setting for many years. These numbers indicate there are almost 100× more automatic updates than manual ones. (I update manually, typically each day, because I enjoy perusing the release notes, just in case there’s anything interesting in them. I’m glad Apple still offers manual updates as a setting.)

★ Monday, 20 May 2024