Security alert: 33% of Android and iOS apps are insecure

According to the decision of Apple and Google, all Android and iOS applications that have not been updated for more than six months will be removed from Google Play and the App Store due to insecurity.

Google and Apple will soon remove about 1.55 million insecure Android and iOS apps from the Google Play and App Store. These are abandoned programs that have not been updated for more than two years. According to analyst firm Pixalate, the abandoned software accounts for more than a third of the combined catalog of applications in both app stores. There are 869,000 of these apps in the Google Play Store and 650,000 in the App Store.

It seems a little strange why Apple and Google suddenly decided to take such a step. On the other hand, after two years of not receiving updates, these types of insecure programs are more prone to hacking than other examples. Apple and Google have adopted policies to counter their plans that have been ignored by some developers. In the Play Store, Google hides software that has not been updated for more than two years and does not display it in search results.

Apple is another company that maintains unsafe and ignored applications after two years. Although a large number of apps appear to have been left unattended, 68%, or 3.1 million of the apps in both stores, have been updated in the past two years. Among the categories that account for the largest share of abandoned programs are training, reference, and games.

More than 1.5 million apps on both Android and iOS platforms have not been updated.

Given that child and teen users are the target of game categorization apps, this can certainly damage the reputation of Apple and Google if its apps are not up to date and exposed to hacking.

The most frequently updated apps seem to belong to the category that has been downloaded the most. 84% of apps with more than 100 million downloads have been updated at least once in the last six months.

Pixalate has also discovered 314,000 “super-abandoned” apps, more than five years after they were last updated. Of these neglected applications, 58% or 184,000 were discovered in the App Store. On the other hand, 42% or 130,000 of these types of software were found in the Google Play Store.

Apps that have been out of order for a long time will no doubt not be able to take advantage of the newer security benefits built into the Android and iOS platforms. That’s why both tech giants want to remove them from their app stores. On the other hand, the developers of smaller standalone applications, expressing dissatisfaction with this decision, believe that there is no need to make any updates or other changes after the release of the apps. This part of the software makers feel that they have been unfairly targeted by Apple and Google.