Google develops apps for the iPhone and many get updated regularly, however, the updates seem to be lagging since Apple instituted iOS App Store Privacy Labels. Google creates iPhone apps because it is primarily a service provider that earns money via advertising revenue, resulting in many of the same popular apps available for its own Android operating system also available to Apple device owners.
With over 80 in the iOS App Store, Google is a prolific iPhone app developer. Some of these are lesser known and have limited appeal to most iPhone owners, but many are extremely popular and have a large number of users. Google updates these popular apps frequently, sometimes several times each month. Older apps such as PhotoScan, which allows glare-free ‘scans’ of a physical photo print, haven’t been updated for two years. Some experimental apps, like Just a Line - Draw in AR, see sporadic updates every year, but sometimes more frequently.
As noted by Fast Company, none of Google’s iOS apps have been updated in the last four weeks. Checking the version history in the iPhone App Store and it’s immediately apparent that the Google app usually gets updated five or more times each month. The version number climbed from 132.0 two months ago to 137.2 one month ago, but no further changes have been posted since then. Due to the work-from-home and stay-at-home requirements that many are currently facing, Google Meet is another popular app. It generally receives two or more updates each month, but currently rests with the last change having arrived four weeks ago. This may be coincidental, but none of Google’s apps show Privacy Labels, since they haven’t been updated. Privacy Labels are a new App Store requirements to disclose what types of tracking and data collection take place with each app.
An easy comparison is to check the Google Play Store, where Android apps can be found, installed, and updated. The iOS App Store shows hours since the last update when less than a day, days when less than a week, and continuing that pattern to show weeks, months, and years since the last change. It also gives that same time reference for the last several versions. The Play Store gives the last date an update posted without any history of earlier releases. Although updates don't roll out to both platforms at the same, using these two resources provides a rough idea of how often an app usually changes, as well as when a version for iPhone was released, and when the last Android update posted.
The Play Store shows Google Meet and Gmail were both updated on December 16, 2020, but the App Store hasn’t had a new version of Meet in four weeks and Gmail’s last change for the iPhone came a month ago. Google Photos was updated for Android phones on December 21, but for the iPhone, it has been a full month since any changes were posted. Google will have to post an update eventually, but perhaps the iOS development team took a long holiday. It could simply be coincidental that a few weeks have passed without updates, but the timing suggests it is either taking longer to reduce any unnecessary privacy concerns in advance, or there is some extra delay while the strategy is being debated internally. Either way, it will be interesting to see when the next Google iOS app updates arrive and what the Privacy Labels reveal.
Source: Fast Company
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