There are a lot of abandoned Android apps and it says a lot about independent development

Hundreds of thousands have gone without updates for at least two years

The applications share a high degree of association with companies. Unless it is based on intellectual property, the Could you Finally, many of them no It lasts for a very long time. The slope is very steep and many developers are not equipped to take on all the challenges along the path unless they receive a decent investment or are purchased. While this isn’t the story for every app out there, there are plenty of them that will pop up in search results in your App Store and won’t receive an update for months or even years. A new report attempts to shed light on the number of so-called “abandoned” apps out there.

Research House Analysts Pixels say (via record And esperAndroid Edge newsletter) They found 1.5 million apps on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store that hadn’t been updated for at least 2 years with 314,000 apps that haven’t been pushed for 5 years or more. On the other hand, 2 million apps were updated in the last year with 1.3 million apps in the last six months.

On the Android side, approximately 870,000 apps fall below the 2-year threshold (58% of market share) with the majority in the 2-3-year segment at 465,000. Among the apps that have not been updated for 4 years or more, iOS takes the largest segment at 290,000 (56%). AppBrain More than 2.65 million apps have registered in active viewing on the Play Store as of the time of writing, which means that nearly a third of them have been abandoned for at least two years.

There are very few low maintenance evergreen apps to get started with although a good portion of them tend to get cult followers. Few of them will be around in the future, though operating systems are gaining sophistication to fight security threats and increase user experiences. The Play Store is already ramping up the pressure on app publishers Commit to frequent updates Or risk being disarmed. This does not mean that Google Play is the end of everything for Android application publishing – Amazon App Store Another profitable example – but no one is able to present such a large audience with more flexible update guidelines.

Independent developers replacing smaller communities You will find it more difficult than it already is to keep up. AppBrain It indicates that about four out of five Android apps have 10,000 downloads or less. However, 31% of apps downloaded 10,000 or less across both Android and iOS have not seen an update in at least two years versus 27% who had at least one update in the past six months.

It seems to a fair number of programmers that standalone mobile app development is quickly losing its viability as a side hustle. Will they be able to Chase and earn revenue from Google and Apple full time? Or will they find themselves out of the picture due to life circumstances or acquisition?

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