iOS, Android stores host more than 1.5 million 'abandoned' apps
- Reference: 1652167873
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/05/10/ios_android_stores_host_more/
- Source link:
Analytics biz Pixalate – the outfit behind the [1]study , titled The Abandoned Mobile Apps Report – told The Register its figures appear "to support Apple's apparent desire to 'clean up' abandoned apps," despite the [2]unpopularity of the announcement with developers. The iGiant last month threatened to wipe away software from its store that hasn't been updated for a significant period of time.
The report consists of data from crawls of the Android and iOS app stores to look for what Pixalate classified as abandoned apps – those that have gone two or more years without an update. Between the two stores in the first quarter of 2022, Pixalate said it found more than 1.5 million abandoned apps, amounting to 33 percent of the more than five million apps it told The Register it examined.
[3]
In contrast, the report said it found only 1.3 million apps that had been updated in the past six months – which it terms "recently updated."
[4]
[5]
Outdated and abandoned applications are a potential security nightmare: vulnerabilities lurking in their code bases and dependencies may be discovered and go unpatched, leaving folks at risk of attack. Design automation biz Synopsys claimed a couple of years back that [6]90 percent of commercial applications it reviewed contained insecure or out-of-date, and likely third-party, open-source components.
Add in first-party code that may have any number of unknown bugs, and the risk posed by iOS and Android abandonware is apparent.
Apple, Google already taking action
The two-year abandonment standard that Pixalate used is a year shorter than how Apple defines abandoned apps. The iGiant [7]recently updated its App Store policy to classify abandoned apps at three years without updates, and said it would begin removing them – along with apps that had failed to meet a certain download threshold over the past year.
Apps that Apple flags will have 90 days to make changes before getting the boot. Even then, apps won't be removed from iOS devices, and in-app purchases will still function normally.
[8]
Apple isn't alone in its decision to begin policing abandonware, either. Google announced in early April that it would begin doing the [9]same for Android apps at the end of 2022, albeit using different metrics. Instead of cutting unpopular apps and time-gating removal, Google will hide app pages and block installations for Android devices running OS versions higher than, or outside two years of, the app's target API level.
As with Apple's decision, Android developers will be given a chance to make necessary updates, and apps won't be deleted or cease to work for those who currently have them – only new installations will be prevented.
The Pixalate study also suggests Apple's App Store is more heavily bloated with older and more outdated apps. Of all the iOS and Android apps studied, 58 percent of those that have gone more than five years without an update are in the Apple shop, and 53 percent that have gone between four and five years without support from their developers.
[10]
A Pixalate rep put that 58 percent in additional context for us, again supporting the idea that Apple was right to crack down: "There are more apps in the Google Play Store (~3.2 million) than the Apple App Store (~2 million), yet more apps have been abandoned for 5+ years in the Apple store." ®
Get our [11]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.pixalate.com/abandoned-mobile-apps-report
[2] https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/425620
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Yno3zs3DfmWsrWCsaN-8jAAAARg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Yno3zs3DfmWsrWCsaN-8jAAAARg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Yno3zs3DfmWsrWCsaN-8jAAAARg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/12/open_source_bugs/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/02/apple_store_old_app_policy
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Yno3zs3DfmWsrWCsaN-8jAAAARg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/07/google_makes_outdated_apps_less/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Yno3zs3DfmWsrWCsaN-8jAAAARg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
12 months?
Glad I'm not expected to update everything I've written in the last 20 years every 12 months. Sometimes, something is written to do a specific task. If the task doesn't change, there's no need to tinker with the UI every other week.
Re: 12 months?
Where are you getting "12 months" from? TFA talks about a time horizon of 2-3 years, not counting notice or grace periods.
Trying to buck a trend?
"Orphan apps" are not unique to Apple or Android. A quick look at sourceforge shows that there are vast numbers of applications that haven't been updated for a lot more than a couple of years, and indeed large numbers of results returned by searches that show no even initial progress (no code present). This seems to be a general condition in the indie developer space. I guess people have a bright idea but lose interest after a while.
On the other hand, there can be good reasons for not upgrading. The application may just do its job sufficiently well as AMBxx suggests. Several of my own math analysis programs never got 'updated'' for that very reason. Then there's the logistical issue. I currently have an open source application that hasn't been updated for almost two years - simply because we lost a key developer and haven't found a successor yet despite plenty of plans for upgrades. However the current version still works and is being downloaded, so it would be silly to withdraw it.
Re: Trying to buck a trend?
I don't know about the Apple situation, but the problem with Android is that there's insufficient attempt to ensure older apps continue to work on newer versions of the platform: if you don't actively update your software some new version of Android will break it.
Google withdrew their original Android email client (com.android.email) some time ago and I've been manually moving it between phones as it is ideal for my purposes. I've now hit a brick wall because versions of Android >9 won't install it.
The whole ecosystem is designed to be ephemeral because new installations and upgrades are potential monetizing events.
Once you're a Google Play developer, you always will be.
Once upon a time I published an Android app and it got a small number of installs. It is now impossible for me, the author, to remove the app from Google Play.
The Google Play Developer Agreement says that Google Play has an indefinite license to your app, since they allow infinite re-installs, therefore you cannot remove your app from the Play store. Fair enough, I agreed to that once, but I also can't close my developer account.
If you don't want to be a Play developer anymore, if you no longer agree with the ever-changing Play Store Deveoper Agreement for example, your only option is to transfer ownership of the app to another developer. Otherwise you have to keep your developer account open forever.
If your app is rubbish, like mine, nobody wants to accept ownership, so you're stuck. You can unpublish your app so it wont get *new* installs, but you can never close your developer account as long as you have any install statistics. Never.
So yeah; one of hose abandonned apps is by me. I wanted to remove it, but I can't.
Re: Once you're a Google Play developer, you always will be.
Same here - the hoops Google want me to jump through just to satisfy their stupid updates are not worth the effort. Yet, it's impossible to actually engage with the idiots to tell them what the situation is! I've tried sending messages to various places as I've come across them but absolutely NEVER get a reply. Google are pathetic, greedy and useless.
Also, as a web developer who has made use of the Google maps API many times in the past on various sites, now, when updating those sites I am moving all mapping to OpenStreetMap because their interface is now simpler than Google's and they don't also demand credit card details up front in order to use the maps.
Hardly surprising...
The majority of mobile "apps" are games; of these, a significant number can be classed as one of these two types:
"My first game" - typically made by a wannabe game developer who has spent too much time playing games and has read about the one-in-a-million run-away successes, and has concluded that making games is a fast and fun way to get rich, these games are usually a cludge-together of downloaded tutorial projects and assets from asset stores, possibly with a couple of extra features hacked in after multiple stack overflow look-ups.
Reskins/asset-flips - much more polished than "my first games", these are easily spotted as, while the visuals and audio may differ, a bit of digging will reveal that it's exactly the same as other games of its genre underneath. These are mass-produced with a fast turn-round and the goal of extracting as much money from the suckers who actually pay for the IAP before whatever trend they are based on goes out of fashion.
In either case, there is no reason for these to be updated - the "my first game" developer will abandon their game as soon as they realise they have not become a millionaire in a week and that making a game is actually hard work, while the asset flippers know that there is no point updating a game that is no longer bringing in the money it once was.
So the App Store and Play being a dumping ground of dead apps is hardly surprising.
Better idea: purge the crap
I dread trying find an Android app to do a simple job. Does it actually work? Is it buried alive in advertising? Does it actually do what it sort of claims? And is app #1 actually different or better than the twenty-five other seemingly identical apps?
I would honestly pay for an app store that was curated by a HUMAN BEING rather than a half-baked algorithm, with one-tenth as many choices.
Abandoned only after
repeated changes to the infrastructure.
There is a very simply formula we use in the industry to assess how rapacious and greedy a platform is. And it's based on the ratio of "abandoned" apps to live apps as a function of releases of OS.
Apparently we're "wrong" - but it works.