Google Actions Growth Rate

How quickly is the market of Google Voice Apps growing?

Emiel Langeberg
4 min readApr 20, 2020

In my last article, I gave an overview of the current state of Google actions. How many actions are there per language?
How many actions are screen-only?
What is de distribution over categories?
Feel free to read the complete article here.

This article will dig deeper into the growth rate of Google actions.
To determine the Growth Rate per language, I took the data from the 1st of January 2020 and compared this with the 1st of April 2020*.
*Note: This data comes from my personal research

New Actions

How many new actions have been published in Q1 of 2020?
I think that would be a great statistic to start from. So here we go!

New Actions in Q1 of 2020

I could start writing a conclusion based on these numbers, but something does not make sense here….
According to these numbers, there should be 33,610 + 3,617 = 37,227 Actions available. But the analysis in my earlier article shows that there are 33,299 Google actions available on 1 April 2020. That number is actually lower than it was on 1 January 2020.
What is going on here?

Deleted Actions

The answer is simple: Other actions must have been deleted during this time. Let’s put those numbers together as well.
Note: since we are now comparing deleted actions, the percentage in the last column shows the decline.

Deleted Actions in Q1 of 2020

Wow, what is happening here? 10% of all the English actions have been removed. And a whopping 24% of all Hindi actions are gone.
Well, this does explain why there are less actions on 1 April compared to 1 January 2020. But I have a ton of new questions now.

Why are so many English and Hindi actions removed?

It is clear that such high number of action removal has not been done by the developers themselves. It looks like Google is actively removing certain actions. What do they have in common?
- Over 200 English removed actions, were also removed in Hindi
- Many of the English removed actions had their privacy policy in Hindi
- Many of the deleted actions had a privacy policy that was based on a particular template. See screenshot below.

Examples of Privacy Policies of removed actions — They are based on the same Template

I cannot say for sure what the reason is for the massive removal of Google actions. But I do believe Google has started to get actively involved, and is removing actions that are for whatever reason not compliant.
This looks like it is done by hand, since I am still finding many available actions that do not have a compliant privacy policy.
E.g. ‘Money Joker’. (see screenshots below)

Left: ‘Money Joker’ in the Google Assistant Directory. — — — Right: the complete Privacy Policy of Money Joker

So… What about the Growth rate?

I started this article with the intention to show the growth rate of Google Actions per language. I hope you found it insightful to see the breakdown in both the New Actions and the Deleted actions along the way.
What is left, is the complete growth overview by comparing the number of Google Actions on 1st of January 2020 to the number of Actions on 1st of April 2020 per language.

Growth of Google Actions per language in Q1 of 2020

Conclusion

- Based on New Actions only, the growth rate of most languages is between 10% - 25% in Q1 2020
- Google is actively deleting actions, especially in the English and Hindi Languages. This could be due to stricter checks of privacy policies
- Due to this active removal of actions, the total market of actions has shrunk with 1% over Q1 2020

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Emiel Langeberg

Creating experiences, Voice-First and inclusion… As a Conversational Designer and Voice-First Technologist, I am pursuing a world where every voice is heard.