Google signals its iOS apps as “out of date” after two months of neglect

Google’s top iOS apps have been seriously neglected in recent months. On December 8, Apple’s App Store began requiring all apps to show privacy “nutrition labels” on the app store list, where developers report what data an app uses to track and how that data is linked to a user. Coincidentally, many Google apps, especially the most popular ones, have not been updated since December 8.

The situation got so bad that Google’s servers briefly signaled its to have IOS applications as “out of date”. As detailed by Techmeme editor Spencer Dailey, Gmail, Google Photos and Google Maps on iOS, they were all caught showing a server-side pop-up message to users saying, “You must update this application. The version you are using don’t include the latest security features to keep you safe. Continue only if you understand the risks. “In fact, Google, you must update this application. Thanks to Google’s sudden disinterest in iOS app updates, messages were displayed even when users had the most recent updates to these Google apps two months ago. The messages have already been removed through a server update.

Presumably, this was an automatic warning that appears when Google app updates reach a certain age and aim to catch people who haven’t been to the App Store in a while. Presumably, Google chose a period of time (about two months) that it thought would never pass without releasing some kind of application update. Now, for some mysterious reason, that period of time has passed, and Google’s servers have briefly accused Google’s application developers of putting users “at risk”.

The theory that Google has suspended iOS app updates as a result of the new privacy labeling has been around for about a month. In early January, Google had some plausible denial. The freeze on the company’s annual holiday code would just be thawing, and with COVID and all the changes to work from home, it’s understandable that perhaps productivity has fallen. On January 5, TechCrunch reported that “a Google spokesman confirmed that the company has a plan to add privacy labels to its application catalog” and that “the labels are due to start rolling out this week or next week. “. On January 12, this was reiterated in an official blog post.

It’s been a month now, and while some Google apps have since been updated with app privacy labels, most of the top popular apps haven’t been updated yet. YouTube, which has its own CEO and runs primarily as a separate company, is the most popular app with privacy labels, but other heavyweights like Gmail, Google Maps, Search, Chrome, Drive, Photos, Keep and Duo have all been frozen since the release of the privacy requirements.

How bad were the iOS updates from Google?

Thanks to the online application version history, we are able to sift through a good amount of data about Google’s iOS app freeze this year. The App Store maintains an official version history from last year, and Archive.org will give us a comparative copy of last year’s iOS updates. As Google’s iOS and Android apps are extremely similar, we’ll also compare how Android updates were released in the same period (through APKMirror’s version history), which will help fix any COVID-related housework difficulties.

It’s pretty clear that Google’s productivity on iOS has stabilized over the past two months. Gmail was last updated on iOS on December 1st, but the Android version of Gmail has had four updates since then: December 10th, January 19th, February 2nd and February 9th. In the same period last year, the holiday code froze 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 in December 1st, while the Android version (not counting the beta releases!) Had nine updates between before and now.

Many Google applications are like this that we will make a big table. These are updates since December 8 (the date of application of Apple’s privacy tags) according to the mentioned sources. These numbers 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’re not counting beta versions of Android, although that doubled some of those Android release numbers.

Several of these apps (Drive, Documents, Spreadsheets, Keep, Duo) have been updated on December 7, the last day to get app updates before the new privacy requirements, which is not looking good.

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