Apple currently has 1,252,777 apps in the App Store and close to 60,000 are added per month. The sheer number of apps and games available severely hampers the discovery experience. Due to this fact research firm Adjust has found that 70% of apps do not get downloaded and are normally removed or do not show up in any of the app lists.
A staggering number of apps simply don’t appear in any position one
of the 39,171 App Store top lists on at least two out of three days over
the evaluation period of one month. Adjust found that in June 2014 79.6% of apps went undownloaded, which equates to 937,387 apps out of 1,197,087 in the entire store.
The problem with dead apps is that they normally are relegated to never being discovered and there are little to no options for developers to get people to organically find and install their content.
So what happens to apps and games that never show up on any app lists? Some just languish in obscurity and others get pulled down. The apps that get pulled often stem from Apple or the developer. Apple tends to suspend apps that breach their terms of service or are otherwise clones of popular ones.
Google Play and Apple tend to be the most popular platforms for app distribution. Given both ecosystems have over one million apps you can see how the discovery process can be hampered by the sheer weight of new ones added every single week. Something has to be said for smaller stores that emphasize curation and editorial content. Amazon and Good e-Reader are two that tend to keep their app numbers low, but put a priority on discovery and ROI.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.