Mastodawn

Wladimir Palant Jan 10, 2025

There seems to be some major cleansing going on in Chrome Web Store. At least 7,500 extensions got removed over the course of the past month. Judging by the extension names most of these don’t appear spammy, and often enough they only had a handful of users. I cannot see a connection to Manifest V3 migration either – plenty of those were already using Manifest V3.

For comparison: in the month before that I could see roughly 600 extensions being removed, and here it’s lots of extension names typical for spam submissions.

Edit: Most of the extensions seem to have been removed in the past two days, often Chrome-Stats isn’t even aware of the removal yet. And Chrome-Stats shows the extensions count drop by more than 4,000 between yesterday and today.

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Dr. Christopher Kunz Jan 10, 2025

@WPalant The placement of these two toots in my feed was almost prophetic.
I wonder if there's a connection? When exactly did the bulk of the removals occur?

Zikasak Jan 11, 2025

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Wladimir Palant

@christopherkunz Well… Nope, unlikely. One is about Chrome extensions, the other about Android apps. Very different ecosystems.

I don’t have data on when the removals occurred exactly. Judging by chrome-stats data (not sure how reliable it is), most extensions seem to have been removed in the past few days.

#Alt4You: Screenshot of two posts. The top post is by WPalant: “There seems to be some major cleansing going on in Chrome Web Store. At least 7,500 extensions got removed over the course of the past month.” The bottom post is by PrivacyDigest: “#CandyCrush , #Tinder, #MyFitnessPal : See the Thousands of Apps #Hijacked to Spy on Your Location.” The second post links to a Wired story on the topic.