Apple recently announced that it will remove apps that have not received updates for a long time. Now Google is following suit: applications that have not been updated for more than 24 months will soon be removed from the Play Store. This concerns 900,000 apps.
Apple’s recent decision to pull apps from the App Store without updates has been met with a storm of criticism, especially from the developer community. An argument from the critics: some apps, such as games, can be “fully developed” and work without updates. Now Apple is getting the wind at its back from the competition.
As Google clarifies in a change to Google Play policy, they will also start banning apps from the Play Store that haven’t received updates for too long. The limit one draws to get rid of what they say is “discontinued applications” and generally increases user safety: if an app hasn’t received an update for two years, it will be automatically banned from the Play Store in the future.
Pixalate Analysts Now Deliver Loud CNET In their most recent analysis, concrete figures show the size: The new guidelines would mean the end of about 869,000 apps – about a third of the stock. For comparison, it also analyzes the situation in Apple’s App Store: nearly 650,000 apps are on the brink of being banned due to missing updates.
However, Google is still giving developers a fairly generous grace period here: The measures should take effect once Android 13 is available for the Pixel family, which can probably be expected in November. In addition, affected applications are not immediately removed from the store but are initially excluded from the search.
Google itself makes its motives quite clear: “We want to protect users from installing apps that may not have the latest privacy and security features,” the company said when announcing the new guidelines. They don’t seem concerned about the loss of hundreds of thousands of applications: “The vast majority of apps on Google Play already meet these standards.”
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