In Q4 2021, 260 connected TV (CTV) apps were delisted across the Roku and Amazon Fire TV app stores, according to Pixalate’s first report tracking CTV app delistings.
Roku accounted for 252 (97%) of the delistings, to Amazon Fire’s eight.
Delisted apps represented just under 1% of the Roku store’s total 27,450 apps in the period, and well below 1% of the Amazon Fire TV store’s total 13,490 apps.
Pixalate estimates that programmatic advertisers spent at least $250,000 on these apps in Q4 prior to their delistings, and 39 (15% of the 260 apps delisted) had programmatic ads.
Roku accounted for 45% of open programmatic ad spend in CTV, to Amazon’s 14%.
The largest delisted CTV apps were DIY Network Go and CW Seed (both in the Roku store), with about a half-million daily active users (DAUs), according to Pixalate’s estimates.
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The top five delisted Roku apps, based on user ratings — Now, Cinépolis KLIC, CW Seed, Paramount Plus and UKTV Play — had more than 76,000 combined user ratings prior to delisting, and accounted for 62% of all user ratings among all apps delisted during the quarter. (See table above.)
Fire TV delisted apps accounted for 19,084 user ratings, with Sonic The Hedgehog 2 and Tube App (for YouTube) driving nearly 60% (about 5,500 each) of total ratings among that store’s delisted apps.
The full lists of delisted apps can be downloaded.
Within Roku, the movies and TV category had the most delisted apps (89), followed by the faith-based and home and food categories (32 and 10, respectively).
Apps delisted from Fire TV were mostly games (three), social and movies (two each).
Apps can be delisted by either the developer or the app store, for a variety of reasons — including fraud, not meeting privacy requirements and security or safety concerns.
The reasons for delistings are generally not publicly available, and Pixalate stresses that it makes no assumptions or assertions about those it identifies as having been delisted.
However, the analysis does note that app-ads.txt files used to identify authorized digital sellers were found on fewer than 30% of the delisted apps (73 out of 260).
Pixalate has previously tracked delistings in the Google and Apple mobile app stores, which have more than 5 million apps combined, or about 100 times as many apps as in the CTV stores.
In first-half 2021, more than 813,000 apps were delisted across those stores, including 440,000 in Q2 alone.
In that analysis, it was found that 25% of delisted Android apps and 59% of delisted iOS apps had no privacy policy, 66% had at least one “dangerous permission” as defined by Google, 27% had access to GPS data, and 19% could access users’ cameras.