San Francisco, Jun 22 (IANS): In a bid to go after spam and clone apps on its App Store, Apple has instituted new tougher guidelines, thus cleaning up millions of apps in the process, media reported.

Apple made it clear recently that it is doing a lot to improve the overall quality of App Store, with the Cupertino-based technology giant putting a heavy focus on clone and spam applications this year, TechCrunch reported on Thursday.

"The new rules which are tougher and more explicit in order to back up those removals has been reportedly used to clean up hundreds of thousands of apps including clone apps, apps that aren't 64-bit compatible and even apps that have been unused for a long period," the report added.

The new App Store Review guidelines state that "apps created from a commercialised template or app generation service will be rejected," which is aimed to reduce the mass produced apps that bloat App Store.

The increase in prevalence of mass production tools for apps, one-click templates and other enabling factors allows for cheap junk apps to go off the rails in the App Store over the past couple of years.

Apart from clone apps that bloat the app store by making copies of popular games like "Flappy Bird" or "Red Ball", this move tries to tackle apps sharing pirated content.

"There are hundreds of copies of music-streaming apps that sell pirated content to make it harder to track them down one by one and allow for single-shot bursts of revenue capture before they're found out or retired," the report added.

Apple first announced its plans to remove "problematic and abandoned apps" last year, removing almost 50,000 applications.

This year, the company continues to ramp up its clean up efforts and looks to put a specific focus on clone and spam applications ahead of the all-new App Store design going public later this year.