Pixalate: 59% of children’s apps removed from the Apple Store did not have a privacy policy

59% of deleted apps from Apple and 25% from Google had no privacy policies detected, according to Pixalate’s first half 2021 deleted apps report. On Google, 26% of deleted apps from Russia had no privacy policy detected; on Apple, 60% of apps removed from the list in China had no privacy policy detected. Additionally, 66% of deleted Google apps had at least one ‘dangerous permission’, 27% had access to GPS coordinates, and 19% could access the camera.

In total, more than 813,000 apps with more than 9 billion downloads – over 86% of which targeted children 12 and under – have been removed from the Google Play and Apple app stores. After analyzing more than five million mobile apps, the report found that consumer privacy and safety, as well as brand safety for advertisers, may be at risk. Notably, deleted apps may remain installed on a consumer’s device even after being deleted from the App Store.

Apps can be removed from the list for a variety of reasons, ranging from relatively harmful (eg, app store policy violations) to benign causes (eg, developer takedown). The report neither asserts nor attributes a reason for a delisting action. In addition, the initiator of the delisting is usually not publicly available information, so it is often not possible to know whether the deletion was triggered by the App Store or the developer.

Pixalate’s data science and analyst team analyzed more than 5 million apps and app developers removed from the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store from January 1 to June 30, 2021. An app is considered deregistered if it existed in a particular app store at any given time. period of interest, then it was deleted.

Read the full Pixalate report.