Often we forget to check if a certain application on our android devices or Apple phones are outdated or not. Even though Google Play Store and App Store on apple phone cannot inform us about the security risk these ‘outdated apps’ posses to the devices, they delete or ban these apps from the store.
Google Play Store and App store by Apple has banned certain apps as they have not been updated for two years or even more. These apps pose significant security risk as they are more susceptible to hacking.
It is therefore advised that users of these apps should immediately delete them.
A new report claims that around one third of the apps from smartphone systems by Apple and Google are two years or older. In numbers, it translates to a whopping 1.5 million apps in total on iOS and Android.
Apple and Google have become stricter now and have launched a crackdown against these ageing apps and are taking action against them.
Apple has announced it will remove the outdated apps from the App Store. Apple said that this includes “developers of apps that have not been updated within the last three years and fail to meet a minimal download threshold — meaning the app has not been downloaded at all or extremely few times during a rolling 12 month period”.
Apple keeps track of such apps as the process to ensure that the apps work for the vast majority of users and support the latest innovations in security and privacy.
Meanwhile, Google Play store has the most, around 869,000 apps which do not meet the recent updates. Recently, Google announced its new Google Play Store policy which took strict actions against the third-party apps for recording calls on Android devices.
Call recording is not allowed in many of the places. Hence, this policy will prevent the third-party apps from recording the call audio stream. The main concerns are these apps could breach privacy and security. Hence, Google decided to remove such third party apps.
It is important to check your apps which have not been updated for long, as these can pose security concerns.
Pre-installed or system apps that already have permission to tap on the Accessibility API and have recording feature, won’t be affected by this new policy.
