Google flags its iOS apps as “out of date” after two months of neglect

Enlarge / The current state of Google's iOS app lineup. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Google's major iOS apps have been seeing serious neglect for the past few months. On December 8, Apple's App Store started requiring all apps to show privacy "nutrition labels" in their app store listing, where developers self-report what data an app uses for tracking and how that data is linked to a user. Coincidentally, a lot of Google's apps, especially the most popular ones, have not been updated since December 8.

The situation has gotten so bad that Google's servers were briefly flagging its own iOS apps as "out of date." As detailed by Techmeme editor Spencer Dailey, 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. The version you're using doesn't include the latest security features to keep you protected. Only continue if you understand the risks." Actually Google, you should update this app. Thanks to Google's sudden disinterest in iOS app updates, the messages were showing even when users had the latest, two-month-old updates of these Google apps. The messages have since been removed through a server update.

Presumably, this was an automatic notice that pops up when Google's app updates hit a certain age and are meant to catch people who haven't been to the App Store in a while. Presumably, Google picked a timeframe (approximately two months) that it thought it would never pass without shipping some kind of app update. Now, for some mysterious reason, that time period has passed, and Google's servers were briefly accusing Google's app developers of putting users "at risk."

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