

A fitter, happier Google Play store

A fitter, happier Google Play store

Talk about spring cleaning. According to techcrunch, citing “a company in the mobile app industry which has insight into changes like this”, some 60,000 apps were removed from the Google Play store in February. That’s a startling number, considering that the total number of apps in the Google Play store is around 700,000.Frankly, it’s about time. Say what you will about Apple and its Steve Jobs-esque control-freakishness with the App Store, but the number of crappy apps (or simply, “crapps”) that gets through the army of Apple’s app reviewers is negligible compared to what lands in Android’s premiere app store.It’s worth noting that while Google was likely doing most of the crapp culling , some of those 60,000 apps were no doubt pulled by their own publishers for various reasons.In any case, it’s likely that this is an effort by Google to fight off spam and malware , of which some of the Google Play store’s wares are comprised. As the company improves on its algorithms for weeding out the muck from the Google Play store--supposedly, Google was already improving on that --it would be nice to see less of it get through the door in the first place.