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Apple’s App Store home to shunned ‘zombie’ programs

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By John Glenday, Reporter

July 10, 2013 | 1 min read

Amidst all the hullabaloo surrounding popular apps such as Angry Birds far less has been said about the far larger group of apps languishing at the opposite end of the spectrum, apps which garner few (if any) downloads at all.

Research into the phenomenon of so-called ‘zombie apps’ conducted by Adeven indicates that this sector could account for two thirds of the 900,000 products currently in the store as consumers are put off by the sheer volume of content.

In a statement the analytics firm said: “579,001 apps out of a total of 888,856 apps in our database are zombies. We can't say exactly how many downloads they have - Apple doesn't reveal this - but it is very small."

Adeven define a ‘zombie’ as apps which have never appeared in Apple’s lengthy top 300,000 chart rundown of the most popular downloads.

The study follows claims by Apple itself that 90 per cent of all apps in the store are downloaded at least once a month with over 50bn apps having been downloaded in the short five year history of the store.

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