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.)
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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.)