Google marks its iOS apps as “obsolete” after two months of neglect

Google’s major iOS apps have been seriously overlooked in recent months. On December 8, the Apple App Store began requiring all apps to display privacy “nutrition labels” in their App Store listing, where developers themselves report what data an app uses. for tracking and how that data relates to a user. Coincidently, many Google apps, especially the popular ones, haven’t been updated since December 8.

The situation got so bad that Google’s servers briefly reported its clean IOS applications as “obsolete”. As detailed by Spencer Dailey, editor of Techmeme, Gmail, Google Photos and Google Maps on iOS were all caught showing a server-side pop-up message to users saying, “You should update this app. you are not using it. include the latest security features to protect yourself. Only continue if you understand the risks. “In fact Google, you should update this app. Thanks to Google’s sudden disinterest in iOS app updates, messages were displayed even when users had the latest updates to those Google apps two months old. The messages have since been deleted via a server update.

Presumably, this was an automatic notice that appears when Google’s app updates reach a certain age and are intended to attract people who haven’t been to the App Store for a while. Presumably, Google picked a time frame (roughly two months) that it thought it would never pass without sending some sort of app update. Now, for some mysterious reason, that period has passed, and Google’s servers have briefly accused Google’s app developers of putting users “at risk.”

The theory that Google halted iOS app updates as a result of the new privacy labeling has been in effect for about a month now. In early January, Google had a plausible denial. The annual freeze on corporate vacation codes would have simply been vanishing, and with COVID and all the work-from-home changes, it’s understandable that productivity may have declined. On January 5, TechCrunch reported that “a Google spokesperson confirmed that the company plans to add privacy labels to its app catalog” and that “the labels are expected to start rolling out as early as this week or so. next week”. On January 12, this was reiterated in an official blog post.

It’s a month later now, and although some Google apps since then have been updated with app privacy labels, most of the major popular apps still haven’t been updated. YouTube, which has its own CEO and is mostly run as a separate business, is the most popular app with privacy labels but the other big hitters like Gmail, Google Maps, Search, Chrome, Drive, Photos, Keep and Duo have frozen everything since the privacy requirements were launched.

How bad have Google’s iOS updates been?

Thanks to online app version histories, we can dig into a fair amount of data on Google’s iOS app freeze this year. The App Store keeps a history of official releases for the past year and Archive.org will provide us with a comparative copy of last year’s iOS updates. Since Google’s iOS and Android apps are all extremely similar, we’ll also be comparing how Android updates were rolled out in the same time period (via APKMirror version history), which will help correct any work from home related to COVID. difficulties.

It’s pretty clear that Google’s iOS productivity has stagnated over the past two months. Gmail was last updated on iOS on December 1, but the Android version of Gmail has received four updates since then: December 10, January 19, February 2, and February 9. During the same time last year, the holiday code crashes for Gmail on iOS ended on January 13, with four updates arriving before February 11, 2020. The same story goes for Google Maps: the iOS version was frozen on December 1, while the Android version (not counting beta versions!) has had nine updates between then and now.

So many google apps are like this that we’re going to make a big picture. These are updates since December 8 (date of application of Apple’s privacy labels) according to the aforementioned sources. These figures show iOS app updates from December 8, 2020 to February 11, 2021, iOS app updates from the same period a year ago, and Android updates from December 8, 2020 to February 11. 2021. We are not counting beta versions of Android. , although that would double some of those Android version numbers.

App updates since 08/12	ios (this year)	ios (Last year)	Android (this year)
Gmail	0	5	4
Google maps	0	6	9
Google search	0	5	27
Chrome (stable)	0	2	6
Google drive	0	9	8
Google docs	0	5	9
Google Sheets	0	6	8
Google Photos	0	9	16
Google keep	0	4	8
Google Duo	0	5	6
Google home	0	3	3

Several of these applications (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Keep, Duo) have been updated sure December 7, the very last day to get app updates ahead of new privacy requirements, which is not very nice.

We asked Google if it has any comments on the “outdated” incident and why iOS app updates are taking so long. We will update this article if the business responds.