Most top Android apps ship an update every month — 248 have gone quiet

Update frequency is the closest thing to a health signal that a store listing gives you. An app updated last week is being worked on. One that has not moved in a year may still be fine — or may be quietly broken on the Android version you are running.

We recorded the last-update date for all 4,800 titles in our index.

The distribution

• 3,457 — updated within the last 30 days (72%)
• 248 — nothing in over 180 days (5%)

Nearly three quarters ship monthly or faster. That is a higher cadence than most desktop software, and it is driven by the same forces that shape the monetisation numbers: live-service games patch constantly, and ad SDKs need updating.

What the quiet tail actually means

Five percent going half a year without an update is not automatically a problem. A single-purpose utility that does one thing correctly has no reason to ship monthly. The risk is narrower than “abandoned”:

• Target SDK requirements. Google periodically raises the minimum target API level for apps to remain distributable. Apps that stop updating eventually stop being installable on new devices.
• OS behaviour changes. Background execution, storage access and notification permissions have all changed in recent Android releases. An app written against older assumptions can fail in ways that look like device faults.

How to read it on a listing

The update date alone is thin. Pair it with the minimum Android version: an app last touched two years ago that still requires only Android 6 is likely coasting, whereas one requiring Android 13 was at least recently rebuilt.

Both figures appear in the specification table on every app page here, and the description notes when a title has gone quiet.

Method

Dates come from the updated field on each Google Play listing, collected on 7 September 2026, across the top 200 free titles in each of our 24 categories.