Windows Store age rating rules kill some 90,000 apps

A little more than a week ago, we reported that Microsoft had started removing apps and games that did not comply with the Windows Store’s new age rating policy. While it wasn’t yet clear how many non-compliant apps disappeared from the Store following this first wave of cleaning, a new report from Windows Blog Italia reveals that 90,291 apps have been removed from the Italian Windows Store between September 26th and October 19th (via Neowin).

According to the report, the number of Windows Phone apps available on the Italian Windows Store has gone from 329,507 to 239,216 following the purge which represents a 27% decrease. As a reminder, Microsoft still claims on this page that there are 669,000 available on its Windows Store though that number has not seen an update since at least a year (not all these apps are available in all markets).

For now, it’s still unclear how this new age rating policy is affecting the Windows Store globally and we have yet to learn about the removal of popular Windows Phone besides high profile voluntary departures from the likes of eBay or even Skype for Windows Phone 8.1 phones. However, the apps that have now been removed from the Windows Store should remain usable for consumers that have downloaded them prior to the cleaning. Additionally, developers can still resubmit their apps to Microsoft after completing an age rating questionnaire on the Dev Center though we doubt they’ll do it now after missing the September 30th deadline in the first place.