The Register does a mixed job reporting on a report, as this seems to be the very buried lede.

[Report co-author and lecturer at the University of East Anglia in the UK Michael] Kummer said the one-third decline looks scary but the paper does point out that these apps only accounted for 3 percent of app usage. “These apps are, largely as Max [Schrems] suspects, useless,” he said.

A one-third decline in apps available for Android is attributed to regulation that requires privacy protection. Schrems has the best quote:

It may well be that some ‘flashlight apps’ are gone now, but I am not sure if anyone misses them.

And that reminds me of Google’s own shady calculator app requiring network access.