If you are a developer of an application working on Android and iOS, perhaps you should be careful and make sure that your applications are still available for download, as Apple declared war on developers in late April, and now Google is following it and preparing to restrict nearly a million applications from the Google Play Store The reason here is not that these applications contain malicious code , or intrude users’ data in any way, but rather because they have not been updated by the developer for a long time!
The story started when iOS app developers were surprised to receive emails warning them that their apps would be deleted because they “have not been updated for long periods of time.” The company’s Store, which means that the number of downloads will be frozen because it is blocked from new users, and this decision will be reversed if an update is sent to those applications within 30 days.
As part of the App Store improvement process, app developers who haven’t submitted an update in the past three years and fail to meet minimum installs—meaning the app was never downloaded or downloaded too few times in 12 months—received an email letting them know That their app has been removed from our store.
– The company in a press release
And now we’ve seen Google take a similar action and prepare to purge 869,000 apps from its store for the same reason that they haven’t been updated for long periods of time (more than two years), and the result of this decision will be that the total of apps available through the Google Play Store will drop to a third soon. The search engine giant made it clear that this decision will be implemented with the official launch of Android 13 , as all applications that have not been updated for long periods will be blocked and access to them through the Google Play Store will be blocked until they are updated.
The reason behind the threat to delete a million applications
I remember in the early days of Android, and my first days with it in 2013 when the phone I owned at that time came with Android version 2.3 Gingerbread , the number of applications available through the Android Market – before it was renamed to Google Play – was very limited, and in general I did not The developers were not interested in releasing copies of their applications on this new system, so the competing system iOS grabbed everyone’s attention and made up the largest percentage of users and thus controlled the applications and games available on it, and gradually the green robot began to spread. My excitement was indescribable when I found a game that was an iOS exclusive being released for it.
The point of this paragraph is to let us know how we got started and where we are. Google has undoubtedly made such a huge stride with its operating system that it was willing to sacrifice reading a million apps from its store when the total available apps in 2011 was only half that number actually, so why attack developers with this the shape!
The apparent reason given by both companies – Apple and Google – is that those applications that are not updated for long periods do not take advantage of the new resources and features that are introduced in each annual update of operating systems, such as new development methods that provide improved protection, which may cause vulnerabilities. A security threat to users.
It might be a logical reason but what’s wrong with games released by independent developers?
For apps, it probably makes sense that developers need to constantly update their apps, but what about games? We’re not talking here about games from big companies like PUBG, but about independent developers who develop their own games. If you have a simple game like Flappy Bird for example, what kind of updates can you send to a classic game like this?
That’s exactly what Protopop Games did when he found an email from Apple threatening to delete his classic MotiVoto game if it hadn’t been updated within 30 days on the grounds that it hadn’t been updated for more than two years. The developer announced his objection via Twitter citing that home platform games from the 2000s are still available for download without issue, and that this decision does not work in favor of independent developers.
Although we have not found independent developers on Android systems complaining about Google’s threat to delete their independent games so far, it is not excluded that it will happen, as the two companies take almost the same policy, it is worth noting that Apple has about 650,000 applications on its store that have not been updated for periods of time. Long which is less than the number available on the Android platform. But in general, the applications that are not affected by this decision represent about 68% of the total on the two platforms.
We still do not know many details about how to implement these strict measures that will undoubtedly harm both parties, we are talking about deleting a million applications! Therefore, we hope that this will be reconsidered, especially in relation to the independent game developers, and the terms of the required updates.