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A new report finds that 1.5 million apps on both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store haven’t been updated in two years or longer and get hidden or removed entirely according to recent policy changes.

These “abandoned” apps constitute one-third of the combined app catalogs of the App Store and Play Store, according to the report from analyst firm Pixalate. Google’s store had around 869,000 apps that had been neglected for more than two years, while Apple’s store had around 650,000. After two years without an update, apps are more vulnerable to exploits, which is why Apple and Google have introduced new policies in recent months that punish apps neglected by their developers.

If an app hasn’t been updated in two years, it will be hidden from view on the Google Play Store and won’t appear in search results. Apple’s policy for outdated apps is far less clear, though at least one developer said their app would be removed because it was more than two years old. 

Plenty of apps are more up to date, per the report, with 68% of apps on both stores, or over 3.1 million apps, updated within the last two years. Apps that updated more frequently tended to be those with far more downloads: 84% of the apps with over 100 million downloads had been updated in the last six months. 

Neither Apple nor Google responded to comment by time of publication.

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Prepaid smartphone sales are starting to become more popular, according to new data from market researcher NPD Group.

NPD released on Wednesday a study that found 32 percent of all smartphone purchases came from prepaid devices during the first quarter. During the same period in 2012, that figure stood at 21 percent.

Although “postpaid” devices, which are subsidized but can lock customers into a long-term agreement, are still most popular, NPD believes the prepaid jump is due to consumers finding more value in older devices that can still hold up well in today’s crowded smartphone space.

“For consumers looking at prepaid phones today, value does not equate with finding phones that are cheap or obsolete,” NPD Vice President Stephen Baker said in a statement. “In fact, the Galaxy S2 and the iPhone 4S, two of the top five prepaid smartphone models in 2013, were among the top-selling phones overall just one year earlier.”

Still, it was Samsung that led the prepaid market, capturing 32 percent of the market in the first quarter. LG was second with 22 percent market share. Apple landed in a tie for fourth place with 8 percent share.

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China is now the world’s largest Android market, market researcher Informa said today.

Informa estimates that about 786 million smartphones will be sold worldwide by the end of the year, up 45 percent compared with 2011. Total Android-based smartphone sales this year will hit 461 million units. One-third of all of the Android devices sold in 2012 were sold in China, making it the world’s largest Android market.

That figure becomes all the more staggering when one considers that the United States is in second place with 11 percent of all Android device sales this year.

The fact that Android was a major success this year isn’t especially surprising, considering research firm IDC revealed recently that the operating system accounted for 75 percent of the global smartphone shipments during the third quarter. That was up from a 57.5 percent share in the third quarter of 2011.

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Android is running on two-thirds of all smartphone sold in China this year, Informa said, and on half of all the mobile phones sold in the U.S.

That’s especially bad news for Apple’s iOS, which could only muster a 5 percent share of the China handset market this year. Microsoft’s Windows Phone owns only 1 percent of the Chinese market.

Still, Apple has been enjoying some success in China. The company last week launched the iPhone 5 in that country and sold 2 million units in its first three days of availability, becoming Apple’s best China smartphone launch yet.

Looking ahead, things will continue to improve for Android, though it’s possible that the operating system could hit a peak at some point in the next few years.

“Looking forward, Android is expected to continue gaining market share globally and, by 2015, one in every two handsets sold worldwide will be powered by it,” Informa principal analyst Malik Saadi said today in a statement. “However…the market share of this platform could potentially peak — or even decline — after 2016 owing to a more aggressive penetration of the alternative OSs, most notably Windows Phone.”

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