App Store and Goole Play are inundated with abandoned apps

There is often talk of the number of apps downloaded daily from App Store And Google Play, which ones are the most successful and which prove to be more profitable for developers, but there is less discussion about how much of the vast park of apps of the two stores is updated regularly. An interesting study sheds light on the phenomenon, highlighting how the so-called app “abandoned“, or applications that have not received any updates in the past two years represent a percentage far from negligible.

OVER 1.5 MILLION ABANDONED APPS

According to Pixalate estimates, at the end of the first quarter of 2022 the abandoned apps in the two stores are in total over 1.5 million: 650,000 are in the App Store, 869,000 in the Play Store.

For reference, 1.3 million apps were updated in the fourth quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022; to put it differently, the apps not updated in the last two years outnumber those updated in the semester prior to March 31 last. And again: 1.5 million apps represent about 30% of all those existing in the two stores (5 million).

But there is even worse: the analysis also highlights the existence of beyond 314,000 apps that haven’t received new updates for over 5 years, and are almost equally distributed between the two stores: 58% (184,000) in the App Store and 42% in Google Play (130,000). Those that have not received updates for more than four years are 500,000.

The consequences of this cemetery of apps – which however continue to be downloadable – can be easily understood: an outdated app is a source of potential risks to user safety who continue to use it. The good thing is the most downloaded apps seem to receive new updates on a regular basis: 88% of apps with over one million (total) downloads were updated in the observation period (early October 2021 – late March 2022).

The study also provides some predictions on the categories of apps that are likely to be updated regularly, namely Finance, Health and Shopping. And instead more games and educational apps are likely to be abandoned: 38% of these apps have not received updates in the last two years; a not very encouraging prospect because they are mainly used by younger users who are thus exposed to the aforementioned risks.

WHAT APPLE AND GOOGLE ARE DOING

Pixelate’s analysis tries to quantify the consistency of out-of-date apps in the two main stores, but Apple and Google are aware of the phenomenon and have already implemented measures to combat it. The Cupertino house last month began to warn app developers that have not been updated for a significant amount of time (rather vague indication) that in case of failure to update in the next 30 days it would have removed the content from the App Store. Instead Google has formalized the new rule that requires developers to use APIs no older than two years from the last major release of Android; otherwise the apps will not be removed but made no longer identifiable by users.