For mobiles, on the App Store and the Play Store, more than 1.5 million applications are obsolete and yet very present. A worrying figure because these abandoned applications remain available and almost always suffer from major security flaws.
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The Play store and the App Store would be like a fridge filled with expired products. This is in any case what emerges from a survey carried out by the company Pixalate. Entitled The Abandoned Mobile Apps Reportthis report shows that there would be more than 1.5 millionapps abandoned by their authors in the two app stores, i.e. 33% of the five million apps available. To arrive at this total, the company counted only those that hadn’t seen updates for at least two years. The study also shows that 1.3 million applications have received updates over the past six months. The fact that all these non-updated applications remain available causes major security concerns. security. Unpatched vulnerabilities are almost systematic and it has even been found that 90% of applications have open source components with large flaws.
Cleaning up abandonware
On the side of Apple, surprisingly, the notion of obsolescence is not the same. The firm considers that an application is abandoned only after three years without an update. It is only from this period that Apple begins to think it’s time to clean up. It must be said that according to the study, 58% of the total of applications that have not received updates for five years are on the App Store. For Google, same fight, the removal of these applications obsolete will be carried out from the end of the year. On the other hand, the company will set up a procedure which will depend on the version of Android of the mobile. If the app without an update is two years out of step with the user’s Android version, then it is hidden from the Play Store.
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