What’s up with Google and hiding useful data lately?
It seems all Google wants to do these days is to remove valuable stats from public view. Recently, the company made the brave decision to take away dislike counts from YouTube, a step that was met with heavy criticism from both content creators and users. This following change might be a little more significant, especially if you’re the kind of person to buy a lot of apps and games. In a bizarre move, Google Play seems to be testing the removal of the “last updated” section from listings in the Android app.
User reports have started to pile up on Reddit, pointing out that the “last updated” section, typically found in the app’s description, was missing from listings entirely. We’ve seen this behavior on some of our own devices, and on others the changelog and app description have vanished as well. We haven’t observed any of this behavior on the web version of the Google Play Store — only on the Android app.
If you’ve been hit by this change, it means that you can’t easily see when an app was last updated. If this is intentional, this is something that can be particularly troublesome with some apps and games, as you’d have no way of quickly telling if something is in active development or not. Many apps will work on your Android 12 device after going years without an update, but considering there’s a new major version of Android every year, there’s the chance stuff will break at some point if no one is actively maintaining it.
This seems to be a limited A/B test as of now. We’re also considering the possibility that this could be a bug — as we said before, both the changelog and the app description were missing for us. If it’s indeed intentional, we sure hope Google doesn’t push this to everyone.
Read Next
About The Author
