How can you tell if an app was removed?
Search for it in the App Store on your iPhone. If it doesn't come up, it may have been removed, but it may also have been renamed, or not be sold in your country. A removed app has no Store page in any country.
To be sure, check more than one country's store, as explained below. AppSheriff does that for every app on your iPhone or iPad at once, and marks the ones no store lists as Not on App Store.
If you know an app's bundle ID, you can also ask Apple's public lookup service yourself; it's the same one AppSheriff uses. A store that doesn't list the app answers with a result count of 0:
curl "https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?bundleId=com.example.app&country=us"Why does the country matter?
Every country has its own App Store, and developers choose where to sell. Banking, shopping and local-service apps are often sold in one or a few countries, so from anywhere else they look like they don't exist.
The developer's own test iPhone shows how much this matters. Checked against the US store, 33 of its 287 third-party apps came back missing. The UK store found 15 of them, all regional apps such as BBC News, BBC Weather and Argos. Seven more countries' stores found none of the other 18. Counting one store's "not found" as "removed" would have flagged 15 apps wrongly on that one phone.
How does AppSheriff check every app?
Every App Store app on your iPhone carries the country it was bought from in its purchase record. AppSheriff takes the most common one, looks each app up in that country's store first, then in the US and UK stores, and marks an app Not on App Store only when none of them lists it.
Only the apps' bundle IDs and the country are sent, to Apple's public lookup service. The same answer gives each app's latest version and its release date, which is where the other flags come from: Abandoned when the latest release is 24 months old or more, and Stale at 12 months. You can change both thresholds, pick the country, or turn the check off in AppSheriff's Settings.
Your own test builds, TestFlight betas and company apps were never on the App Store, so AppSheriff doesn't flag them as removed.
Why do apps get removed from the App Store?
- The developer takes it down. They stop selling it, shut down the service it depends on, or replace it with a new app. Pocket, whose service shut down in 2025, and Skype, retired in May 2025, were among the missing apps on the developer's test iPhone.
- Apple removes outdated apps. Under its App Store Improvements process, Apple removes apps that haven't been updated in three years and have very few downloads. The developer gets a notice first, and 90 days to submit an update.
- Apple removes apps that break its rules. An app that no longer follows the App Review Guidelines can be taken down, in every country or only in some.
- It was never sold where you are. Not a removal, but it looks like one from your country's store.
What happens to a removed app that's still on your iPhone?
It stays, and it keeps working for as long as it can. It won't get another update, so no bug fixes, no security fixes and nothing to keep it working with new versions of iOS. If it depends on a service that has shut down, it may already be broken.
It's also an app you'd lose for good if you deleted it by accident, or if iOS offloaded it to save space.
What happens if you delete it?
In most cases it's gone for good. With no Store page there's nothing to download again, even if you paid for it, and deleting removes its data from the phone as well. Anything the app kept in iCloud or on its own servers stays there, but you may have no app left that can open it.
So export what matters from inside the app first: notes, documents, photos or anything else you want to keep. Then delete it. AppSheriff's delete sheet lists every app you selected, with its size, before anything is removed.
Should you offload it instead?
No. Offloading removes the app but keeps its documents and data, on the assumption that you'll download the app again from the App Store later. A removed app usually can't be downloaded again, so offloading it can leave its data on the phone with nothing to open it.
If you still use an app that's gone from the Store, keep it installed and stop iOS from offloading it: turn off Offload Unused Apps, which recent versions of iOS keep in Settings under Apps, then App Store. If you don't use it, delete it and get the space back.
An app that's already offloaded and gone from the Store can't come back at all. AppSheriff shows it as Not on App Store, the status that outranks Offloaded.
How common are removed apps?
On one phone, more common than you might think. On the developer's own test iPhone, 18 of 287 third-party apps weren't listed in any of the nine countries' stores checked: about one app in sixteen. Seventeen had been removed from the App Store, Pocket and Skype among them, and the eighteenth was a test build that had never been on the Store. Of the 254 apps the US store did list, 9 hadn't been updated in more than two years.
That's a single device, not a survey. AppSheriff sends no usage data, so there's no larger sample to report.