79 ms·

Apple says they're removing my game because it's more than 2 years old

668 points by keleftheriou 4y ago

jabthedang 4y ago
exabrial 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
productceo 4y ago
Expecting to be an unpopular opinion, but this also seems like an effective way to enforce maintenance and progress. If a good app is no longer maintained, this will release space for new enterprising developers to come in and fill.
userbinator 4y ago
I have binaries from early 90s (small utilities) that I wrote back then and still use today, and they do not need changed because they are truly done and bug-free. Thank Microsoft and IBM (PC) for backwards compatibility, it's a good thing I made the choice back then to stay away from Apple. Fuck forced obolescence and this idiotic notion that constant change is somehow necessary. It's only necessary to feed out-of-control corporate greed. If Apple had its way with everything, we'd probably all have to buy new appliances and rewire/rebuild our houses every few years because nothing would be compatible with anything older. Do not want.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Yes, Apple should have built in emulators for 68K, PPC, 32 bit x86 and 64 bit x86 applications.
- Handytinge 4y ago
  I have many games and apps built for older versions of Windows that do not work. How is this forcrd obolescense? This has 0 impact on those who already have the software downloaded onto their device. It's worth noting that Google do the same thing on the play store. It seems your issue is less about the facts of the matter at hand, and more broadly a dislike of Apple.
butz 4y ago
Is there any effort going into iOS game preservation? Or current mobile games are just not worth it?
butz 4y ago
Could it be easier just to rewrite this game on web technologies and build a hybrid app for App Store? As a bonus it will work as PWA on any device (if author wishes to publish is like that), and future updates will be much easier.
infogulch 4y ago
How much is this about being 'fresh' or using new OS features vs running old apps through their changed policies and app submission screening process?
almostdigital 4y ago
I think it has to do with swift runtime deprecations. I have an objective-c app that is as old as the AppStore and I haven't updated it for 8 years [1], Apple even updated it once themselves somehow to support iOS 11. Another of my apps was removed with a similar vague explanation as the OP got and it was written using Swift [2]. While I understand that they might want to drop support for old runtimes the 30-day deadline is ridiculous. And if you miss it you need to re-submit the app and lose your ratings etc. I made nowhere near enough in the ~2 year period my app was available to justify spending the effort to modernize the project so I just let them remove it... [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/seismometer/id288966259 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/seismometer/id288966259 [2]: https://github.com/jnordberg/triggy https://github.com/jnordberg/triggy
- gardaani 4y ago
  Does anyone have a Swift app without updates for more than 2 years on the App Store?
sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
live by the store, die by the store
bobthechef 4y ago
mensetmanusman 4y ago
If Apple were cool they would have a boneyard section of the App Store where digital archeologists could sift through every abandoned app. Maybe they could implement a 20 year policy where it becomes possible for the community to try to fix things that Apple breaks through forced updates.
awinter-py 4y ago
> while performing worse on old devices ^ feels key. as a perpetual old device user it feels like platforms are continuously degrading the value of my hardware with updates, perhaps unintentionally through changes to hardware acceleration, sometimes intentionally like apple's throttling not surprised developers feel just as squeezed
hardsoftnfloppy 4y ago
jdrc 4y ago
by analogy, youtube should pull all the videos that are not at least 1080p
yessirwhatever 4y ago
Requiring software to use the latest versions of their SDK is not an excessive request. You're welcome to not publishing your apps on App store.
endgame 4y ago
I considered going into phone apps, and reversed course after Jobs' attempt to limit the set of languages one could code in. I have never regretted the decision, and wish other devs would stop building on such unstable foundations.
hapiri 4y ago
Maybe a change in IP legals that can force corporations to open source deprecated platforms can help preserving these cultural artefacts.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
interpol_p 4y ago
This has also happened to me with three games I have worked on (published 2010, 2012, and 2015) I updated the most popular one to keep it on the store, and made it much better in the process. It didn't support modern iPads with rounded corners, and I updated some of the menus and fixed a few small but long-standing bugs In all it was a good thing that something got me to make an effort on keeping my stuff polished. It took about two days, but I ended up with a much cleaner git repo, fixed build issues, and better media and copy for the store presence As for the other two games? I was happy to let them go. They were beyond my ability to update for modern hardware. I'd rather not have them publicly available than running in some half-assed compatibility mode for modern hardware I suspect I'm in the minority, but I like being forced to keep my active software actually actively maintained
makecheck 4y ago
The worst part of all of this is that their stores DO have heaping mountains of apps that should be removed: the outright scams, the useless apps full of trackers, etc. Absolutely no effort whatsoever is being placed into removing things that are truly harmful. There is a very clear hierarchy here, and it isn’t “developers first” or even “developers 7th”. Instead, it is: whatever makes an absurdly rich company even richer is A-OK, the “curated experience” will be sure of that.
exodust 4y ago
I hope web pages are never removed from servers on the basis of last modified date! I wonder what is the etiquette for devs in their update notes, when there's no other change except this pulse update? Describe it accurately or slap a generic 'bug fixes' label on?
keleftheriou 4y ago
Similar to the author of the tweet, Apple removed a working version of my FlickType Keyboard that catered specifically to the visually impaired community, just because I hadn't updated it in 2 years. Meanwhile, games like Pocket God have not been updated for 7 years now: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pocket-god/id301387274 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pocket-god/id301387274
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Can you just add a Marshawn Lynch-style "I'm just here so I don't get fined" line of text to the app's "about" page and call it a day? Or are you gonna have to make major changes to update to the latest versions of iOS?
  - keleftheriou 4y ago
    Having to use the latest Xcode to build and submit the app is often already a big enough headache, due to how many things Apple changes between versions. Another example from someone else: "That literally happened to us. Boss wants to change our iOS game icon. Changing icon requires a new build. A new build requires iPhone X support. iPhone X build target requires Xcode 9. Xcode 9 requires macOS 10.12. OS update breaks old Unity3D. Upgrading Unity breaks build." https://twitter.com/aaefiikmnnnr/status/931222777301835782 https://twitter.com/aaefiikmnnnr/status/931222777301835782
    - chii 4y ago
      > A new build requires iPhone X support so the existing build doesn't support iphone X? Isn't this a good reason for apple to push your app out because they want all their apps to support their latest phones?
      - lostmsu 4y ago
        Reason? Maybe. A good one? I don't think so.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fsflover 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31135278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31135278
TheJoeMan 4y ago
LowStakesConspiracy: Apple needs to keep developers buying newer Macbooks / iPhones.
- viro 4y ago
  Or they don't want customers downloading apps that don't properly support their devices. makes the customer experience suck.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    The customer-breaking changes are coming from Apple, not the app developers. If Apple is so concerned about customer experience, they can just as well choose not to break existing apps. The "customer experience" excuse hasn't held water in decades.
    - Someone 4y ago
      I think it has. On Windows, famous for its backwards compatibility, you still have software that shows ancient dialogs, have graphics at a resolution for 640×480 monitors, or that work with 8.3 file names, and only with those (so, you can’t save docs with long names, and have to guess at the short names of files and directories with long names) Yes, banning such apps is a loss for the customer experience of being able to run such applications, but there are disadvantages, too. For many of those applications, users would be happier _if_ those applications were maintained and adjusted to modern hardware and new OS capabilities. Now, of course, that’s an _if_. Apple makes a different choice than Microsoft there. They think losing applications isn’t a big problem (presumably as long as replacements exist, but even that isn’t strictly necessary for some tools. The public at large can do without a Kermit program or RSS reader, for example, because it has alternative ways to download files or access news)
      - Brian_K_White 4y ago
        1) The customer who does not need a Kermit app is not forced to use one. Nor even are they forced to live with a crappy OS just so that old apos can keep working. The customer who does need a Kermit app, is forced to live without. 2) Even worse, they are forced to live without even though the work was done to create one and they had it yesterday. This is not all explained my mere inevitable and unavoidable compatibility creep, nor by the sensible goal not to be Microsoft with their mountains of Rube Goldberg code to deal with countless obscure backwards compatibility quirks. That will make things break eventually, but this an arbitrary and voluntary choice driven by goals other than serving the needs of users as well as possible in trade for their money. Apple values their appearance and their revenue stream above all else. Setting aside malware and other demonstrably legitimate security topics, because we aren't talking about apps that are no longer safe to use for some reason, or that are no longer compatible with the OS because of security-related changes in the OS.: Purging all apps that are "ugly" or have any sort of undesired ux, or that aren't generating income for Apple one way or another, benefits Apple, not the users. The users would prfectly happily simply not use an app that sucked. If any are using it, then it must be supplying some function that the user wants. Whatever that function is, obviously it matters more to the user than any of the excuses for removing it. It only benefits Apple to purge them, not the user, and it's not a case of "What's good for Apple is good for is good for all Apple users" I don't claim it's just Apple either. Google increasingly does the same thing, just a bit less.
pjmlp 4y ago
On the other side the grass has the same colour. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2022/04/expanding-plays-target-level-api-requirements-to-strengthen-user-security.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2022/04/expanding-... It sucks, but this is what happens when platform vendors don't want to play the Microsoft's card of backwards compatibility to keep old applications going. Also a way to force adoption of new APIs, even if they are irrelevant for many applications.
- noobermin 4y ago
  At this point, I see no other option other than lobbying your congressmembers to regulate SV companies finally. Now companies are enforcing the uptake of new APIs for no real purpose? Half of the churn is just to pad googler pedigree and advance within the company, it is a shame they are enforcing that culture on their users.
  - mmis1000 4y ago
    For google, it is mostly for fighting against random api abused usage in China apps. China apps can always find a new way to abuse apis that mean to enhance the user experience to tracking and data stealing.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So you want the government to come in and force software platforms to maintain backwards compatibility forever?
    - hda2 4y ago
      No, just ban software stores from removing working apps for no good reason.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        So you want the government to come up with “good reasons”? Would a “good reason” be that Apple stopped supporting 32 bit hardware? An app didn’t support new display sizes? The notch?
kbd 4y ago
What. I still play Super Hexagon occasionally and I’ve had that game on my phone for like 10 years. Checked, was last updated in 2018: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/super-hexagon/id549027629 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/super-hexagon/id549027629
jobs_throwaway 4y ago
aSithLord 4y ago
only a user having the choice to sideload or not can solve the issues of the AppStore.
kerng 4y ago
This is very bad news for indies, and will help large companies push them out. I have games in AppStore not updated for many years. They work well on all devices, I also consider them to be a piece of art. And feedback is very positive! Getting anxious that Apple will pull it. Releasing a new version sounds easy, but it's a significant time effort (chain of dependencies, build environments and game engines are complex) with 0 value to anyone - because it is perfect and a piece of art. Why don't they have better options for discovery, rather than saying "old is bad". I have comments from people saying my game is their favorite childhood game and they have they have fond memories and stuff - and they are happy to play it now once in a while even. Apple logic makes zero sense, it's like destroying books or paintings and stuff.
- Crabber 4y ago
  Calling something "art" doesn't magically make it immune to decay. Paintings have to be restored, books have to be reprinted. If your art is so cherished to you and other people then surely that should give you even more motivation to spend time ensuring that it is preserved into the future, no?
  - Tams80 4y ago
    They only comparable decay is bit rot.
  - hedora 4y ago
    "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
    - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
      Try to remember that you're talking about a video game that's considered abandoned, and that the author is allowed to re-upload it to keep it up This is actually because the author doesn't want to do small labor, not because people are being silenced or murdered
ianlevesque 4y ago
I am having trouble summoning the outrage I see in the other comment threads here. The App Store is stuffed full of abandonware. Apple should be more aggressive with this, not less. If you can't recompile your app and patch up support for recent OSes and recent devices on an ongoing basis, then your business model is not sustainable. I know, I used to sell iOS apps. The market right now is absolutely flooded with indie games, some light pruning is probably for the best.
- gcheong 4y ago
  If they actually gave any indication of what exactly they think needs to be updated other than the age of the app I would tend to agree but if an app is considered complete and running fine on current devices then it’s not abandonware.
- gameswithgo 4y ago
- Aulig 4y ago
  iOS and Android usually have perfect backwards compatibility, so there's no technical reason to require a new build. The apps work perfectly fine on new devices automatically.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    iOS does not have “perfect backward compatibility”.
- Tams80 4y ago
  I hope that boot's tasty.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  > then your business model is not sustainable As if that was the concern there at all. Most people who publish free games consider them "art", not "business model".
- 4y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I have had many apps (over 20) on the store, since 2012. I haven't had any that has weathered the OS changes past a couple of major steps, without having to make some code changes (sometimes, nothing more than just recompiling with the latest toolchains). I just put out an update to my very first app, which is ten years old, but I have done a few updates, since first releasing it. I have another app that is about two years old, and it needs a facelift. I don't have the bandwidth to give it said facelift (It still works, but looks like crap). I hope it won't get pulled before I can give it its update. I won't blame Apple, if they do pull it, however (see "looks like crap," above). I've generally retired most of my apps, when they got long in the tooth.
gentle 4y ago
This is exactly why I refuse to buy any ios apple that cost more than $1. They're inevitably going away. This is also why the iPad is never going to replace a computer for me. Any productivity ecosystem I create for myself is just going to break after a couple of OS updates.
- phonebucket 4y ago
  But what's the rationale behind this specific $1 limit? If something were to keep me entertained for several hours with no advertising, I'd certainly consider that worth $1. Going down the free route would likely end me drowning in a sea of advertisements.
- nyuszika7h 4y ago
  Generally, even if an app gets removed from the App Store, you can still redownload it anytime if you've previously purchased it. The only exception is egregious cases where the developer's account gets terminated. But even then, if you backed up the app's IPA in advance, you can reinstall it anytime. (This is distinct from sideloading, as an Apple-signed IPA is encrypted and tied to your Apple ID but has no expiry date.)
DaveSapien 4y ago
This has happened to me also (indie game dev) a few years ago. The number is about 20 or so games that have been removed by Apple because they hadn't been updated in two years. The worked perfectly fine on all the new hardware/software and even work today. On top of that, I know that there is another 30 or so apps I was involved in with clients that have also been removed. These weren't the biggest apps/games in the world, but they were all high quality finished products that had nothing wrong with them. Its just the cost of re-publishing each one out-weighed the return, so I didn't have much of a choice sadly. I do have plans to re-publish some of them, however they have to take a back seat for current work. All that to say, I have a large part of my portfolio of work that is no longer available to the public, which just sucks.
- septillianator 4y ago
  Seems like there is justification in Seperating them into an archive appstore/section at least.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Now ask how much it costs shovelware authors to republish their apps, and they probably do it all the time because the quality sucks.. Guess this ‘remove all the great apps that don’t need to be updated’ strategy is going to backfire.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    Is it more profitable in the short term?
  - hugi 4y ago
    A better strategy would be to allow app publishers to log in and indicate in some way that the app is still "good" and active. Now I have to make a "fake update" to a perfectly fine app because of this. Of course the best strategy would be to just don't do this at all. I find it offensive that a single company can decide on a whim to erase my perfectly fine software from history, because it's "ancient" in their opinion (two years old).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mysterydip 4y ago
This is exactly why I wanted to leave Apple's ecosysyem for my games and go pure HTML5. Attention and updates (XCode, OS) needed just to keep an app up, not worth the time for me.
- bfelbo 4y ago
  Yeah, HTML5 is incredible in that way. How much effort would it be for you to convert your iOS games to HTML5? Very curious as we’re building a mobile-focused platform for HTML5 games that make it easy to make your game social. I’d love to help save some of these great iOS games being removed.
gameswithgo 4y ago
mdoms 4y ago
Stop tending other peoples' gardens. Especially trillion dollar companies' ones. No sympathy here, we all know the drill by now.
- clintonb 4y ago
  > Stop targeting the two largest mobile platforms to gain customers and revenue. That’s my paraphrasing of your statements. If the customers are in the garden, you have to go to the garden. That’s easier than building your own.
- gcheong 4y ago
  I will the day the US gets serious about cracking down on monopolies and I have several gardens to choose from or can start my own.
- throwaway14356 4y ago
  Its just rude to support such eco system. As an experiment i tried an iphone4. Apple support helped register an account which didnt work any more for multiple reasons, the app store works just fine, you just cant get any software. Clicking on download does dl the apps but then it says you must upgrade your OS. There is no software! Developers say they have a version for it but you may not install apple says. What kind of deal is that? Its a good device, it could have all kinds of applications.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    The iPhone 4 is not a “good device”. It’s 3G only and the networks have already announced that they are completely shutting down 3G networks by the end of the year.
    - ratww 4y ago
      Sure, but it could still be used as a wifi-only device. I have an old iPhone 8 that I keep around for music and streaming to a TV.
dheera 4y ago
Yeah I used to have a bunch of (mostly Android Wear) apps on the Google store but they started getting deleted one by one, they kept having new policies that you needed to follow to have your app stay up. I have a dayjob and don't have time for that shit. Pay me and I'll do it.
w0mbat 4y ago
It’s not hard to do a recompile with a slightly newer SDK, check things still work, update the version and copyright and re-upload. That’s how I keep all my apps in the store. Often you find a cheap update you ought to make, like add dark mode support which wasn’t a thing when the app was written. Sometimes you take the app across a tech boundary, like adding ARM code to a Mac app. I can see Apple’s motivation to keep fresh goods on their shelves that work with current OS versions and hardware.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Some apps are feature-complete.
  - w0mbat 4y ago
    No app is feature complete on a changing platform. The OS changes and the new hardware is different. Assumptions made years ago no longer hold. One of my apps has been in the store for 10 years (Mac & iOS) and I have had to make many updates to keep it fresh. (Adding Retina support to the 3d rendering code and the picture assets, going 64 bit on iOS, dark mode, adding ARM to Mac, replacing deprecated API use, etc, etc.). These changes are in addition to updates that fixed bugs or added actual new app features and are part of the cost of doing business.
- newbalance 4y ago
  It's hours of work - recompile, test, publish, test again once new versions hits the App Store. Upgrades and maintenance are a bigger time sink than most consider. And this assumes there aren't any new issues that need fixing during the maintenance.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Games are immensely more complex than your average run-of-the-mill smartphone application. As the author of the submission tweet themselves say: > Now I need to dig up my project file, update the Unity version to make sure it meets the App Store requirements, rebuild, retest, resubmit all to get the exact same game in the exact same place it was before. From my own experience, updating the Unity version tends to not be hassle-free, especially if it's a major version. Updating xcode tends to be a hassle as well, if not outright impossible unless you keep buying new Apple hardware too. And why is the onus on the developers to update apps just for the sake of updating them? Can things not just be "done" anymore? There doesn't seem to be any specific reasons except "we like fresh updates" provided for why the updates should be done. If it works, why remove it? Are they running out of space? Are people being fooled by the application somehow?
keleftheriou 4y ago
Meanwhile, some of Apple's own apps haven't been updated for much longer than that – example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/itunes-movie-trailers/id471966214 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/itunes-movie-trailers/id471966... Rules for thee, but not for me!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mentos 4y ago
  For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law!
- capableweb 4y ago
  It's almost like actively creating and running a market while also participating in it makes you gain unfair advantage. Who would have thought?
  - giveupitscrazy 4y ago
    A company could be perfectly capable of running a market without taking an unfair advantage on their own products. Apple is using terrible business practices here. Valve as an example runs steam with their own games, and also with paid community created remakes of their games sold on their same platform, they exemplify what I would expect from Apple, epic, Google, etc.
- tessierashpool 4y ago
- lupire 4y ago
  I see the data feed is stale, but how do you know the build is stale?
  - ImprobableTruth 4y ago
    The version history mentions the last update. >1.4.4 Nov 3, 2017
layer8 4y ago
I was disappointed when I had to stop using the iSSH app because it wasn’t ported to 64 bits, since the author had died. Now I guess it wouldn’t have helped much if the app had already been 64 bits. Stuff like this is why I would be in favor of alternative app stores.
- ianlevesque 4y ago
  Or switch to Prompt, which is actively maintained by one of the best iOS/macOS developers out there.
  - tedunangst 4y ago
    Uh, well... I bought prompt. Version 1. Which they quickly discontinued and delisted. I'm not paying again for prompt 2.
  - layer8 4y ago
    I have, out of necessity, but there were some features I liked iSSH better for. The other “important” app I lost to the 64-bit transition was Mr. Driller. ;)
nyuszika7h 4y ago
2 years is definitely too early, especially considering they're doing this to developers who are continuing to pay them $99/year to keep their apps up. The iPhone X came out 5 years ago, that was about the last time an update was needed to not look bad on newer devices. Some other commenters here fail to understand that many games are simply completed and don't need much updates to keep working on newer devices, especially if they purposely use minimalistic graphics. Even for regular apps pruning them after 2 years is a bit excessive but it's slightly more understandable there as they'll feel dated more quickly.
Bluecobra 4y ago
Just append “2022” to your game’s name and update the copyright. I just played a “new” Pool & Snooker 2022 game in Apple Arcade and it looks and plays like Pool & Snooker 2012. The copyright says 2012-2022 so I assume the devs just lazily update the name each year and nothing more. Not seeing 10 years of improvement in this. Some of the graphics still don’t even have anti-aliasing…
thewebcount 4y ago
I understand being upset with Apple at this arbitrary cutoff. But can we also talk about why a recompile isn’t as simple as opening the old project and hitting “compile”? I work on a large project (millions of lines of code), which has been in continuous development for 20 years. Every new compiler or IDE release results in us having to dedicate at least one engineer full time for a few days to get our project compiling again with the new tools before the team can switch over. That’s a project that previously compiled with no errors or warnings (because we set warnings are errors to true) suddenly can’t build. It’s ridiculous! I can’t imagine throwing something like Unity in on top of that.
- ploxiln 4y ago
  -Werror is your mistake here. You can still fix warnings when you see them with a new compiler, without using -Werror to cause complete build failures except with a specific set of specially accommodated compiler versions.
  - thewebcount 4y ago
    LOL! If only. We started out that way and nobody fixed their warnings. The only way to make it happen was to make it so they couldn’t compile with warnings. (And we do selectively turn off certain warnings that aren’t helpful and give false positives.) To be clear, I’m not talking about having to clean up a few new warnings with a new compiler release. That’s fine and probably a good thing. We really have to have one of our top engineers dive into it for several days to get things in shape. It just seems really weird to me.
    - erik_seaberg 4y ago
      A code review tool should display warnings, and reviewers should expect fixes for real problems that show up that way (and suppression of false positives).
- SilasX 4y ago
  I was really upset when I ran into this problem with Docker. Like, I thought the whole point of virtualization was that, no matter how old it is, it will Just Work, so long as the virtualization software works, and it has enough resources. It’s supposed to sidestep the problem having to constantly patch everything that might have changed since. Then one day, our startup brought some new employees on, who read the README and ran the indicated Docker command … and it failed with a mysterious bug requiring dev resources to debug! The exact thing you try to avoid by freezing the machine environment. It turned out that Docker had silently pushed a backward-incompatible change in the format of docker-compose YAML files.
aeturnum 4y ago
As with so many Apple policies this is perfectly understandable but becomes unacceptable because they monopolize access to applications on their platform.
amelius 4y ago
There is one thing worse than government regulation: having your market regulated by a company.
kazinator 4y ago
If you want to make stuff for the people who chose to impose the Apple platform between you and them, that's what you deal with. It's a choice. Maybe the breaking churn in Apple is what brings the novelty seekers, and their money. Unity and whatever breaking and not running well on older hardware has to do with people buying new hardware. Those are the people who bring the money to the table, which is what you must want a piece of if you have your neck in that toilet bowl.
m34 4y ago
At some point it makes sense to update even if the content itself is "complete": supporting newer screen resolutions natively (instead of going with some kind of fallback behavior), making sure all the outdated and long since sunset 3rd party SDK calls don't cause crashes etc. Also if you managed to build, prepare (App Store metadata in different resolutions etc), submit and finally get your app shipped to the end user that was no small feat a couple of years ago. Probably not a very useful skillset to have if you only do it very infrequently (read: waste of time). Requiring additional screenshots, icon sizes, universal app (iPhone+iPad, also supporting split view), new copy for different types of meta (e.g app sub title) for all the locales you probably had translated externally at some point, new privacy guidelines etc.. all not very attractive to get into even if not forced to update like this, especially if you lose your ratings in the process.
- Jyaif 4y ago
  > supporting newer screen resolutions natively That's not the case anymore, but yes during the first ten years of iOS you had to recompile and resubmit your app to support new screen resolutions. That was incredibly dumb. Even Android did not do this mistake.
vimy 4y ago
This happened to my sticker app. Simple iMessage stickers. The stickers are done and I have no desire to add more. What is there to update? … I can’t wait until Apple is forced to add third party stores.
ronenlh 4y ago
Similar current Twitter thread on the same issue: https://twitter.com/lazerwalker/status/1517849201148932096?s=21&t=WmfisrahF3xRfAl967K7Lg https://twitter.com/lazerwalker/status/1517849201148932096?s...
bricemo 4y ago
As a game developer I’ve always been saddened by the ephemeral nature of games. It seems impossible to make a game that would last 20, 50, 100 years. Books, paintings, even movies have such an advantage
- refactor_master 4y ago
  That’s not strictly true. There are multiple examples of e.g. Sony and Nintendo re-re-re-releasing old games that are easily 20 years old. But the comparison isn’t entirely fair. If you were to compare a game to a concert or a festival, as an “ephemeral cultural performance by a large group of people” you could also argue that a festival lasts for a set number of days, until it’s gone, forever.
  - ronsor 4y ago
    Arguably the best way to make a game that'll last "forever" is to target some old console that has plenty of emulators available. If you make a PS1 game in 2022, I guarantee there will still be an emulator that can run it 20 years from now.
- hedora 4y ago
  Almost all commercially released games that are over 20 years old run fine on current cell phones or one of these: https://retrododo.com/best-retro-handhelds/ https://retrododo.com/best-retro-handhelds/ Software archival is not that hard unless the ecosystem is specifically designed to prevent it.
- rdsnsca 4y ago
  Klondike has been running on Macs since 1984 and iOS since 2009 as iKlondike. Source: https://casteel.org/Pages/Narrative.html https://casteel.org/Pages/Narrative.html
- randyrand 4y ago
  you just gotta develop a game for a stable platform. N64, GC, Wii, NES, all of their games still run on modern hardware. Webapps will probably fair pretty well too. As does Win32, Wine, Proton. Your choice of stable platforms is actually pretty big in the game world! Pretty much every platform except native mobile!
TheChaplain 4y ago
We need independent appstores where developers can distribute their work as they see fit.
simonbarker87 4y ago
I received an email this morning saying the same about one of my apps, it hasn’t got any crash reports, still gets downloads after 5 years, doesn’t need a v2 and Apple decide it’s time to go. Due to swift version changes I don’t have time to push a meaningful change as it doesn’t compile any more.
aendruk 4y ago
I’m personally banned from selling on Amazon “due to inactivity”. In college Amazon advertised on campus that you could sell your textbooks, so I did that. Now, years later, they advertise “Sell Your Stuff”—but too bad, in the interim my account was closed without notice and there’s no appeal, and no way to open a new one.
emsy 4y ago
It’s fine. I mean Apple refunds you if the App you bought gets removed, right?
xwdv 4y ago
> I'm sitting here on a Friday night, working myself to to bone after my day job, trying my best to scrape a living from my indie games, trying to keep up with Apple, Google, Unity, Xcode, MacOS changes that happen so fast my head spins while performing worse on older devices. I can’t help but shake my head when Indie game devs unload these sob stories trying to garner support. If it’s so hard for you then just stop making games. I often get this whiff of entitlement from indies that we should be supporting them because they are small, often one man operations. Or that because they invested so much time and money building a game, they should deserve to get that back through sales. But the world doesn’t need more indie game devs, the world needs better games. I doubt a game that hasn’t been updated in 2 years is any good or doesn’t have a million competitor clones by now.
- ratww 4y ago
  > I doubt a game that hasn’t been updated in 2 years is any good or doesn’t have a million competitor clones by now. That statement doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Games can be "finished products". Do you also think that movies and songs that haven't been updated aren't good? There are plenty of games from the 80s, 90s, 2000s that are still selling today, in unmodified form, running via emulators. And clones are 99.9% pure garbage that don't replace the real thing.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    Games stopped acting like products long ago, and are now expected to be as a service.
    - hedora 4y ago
      But at that point, a bunch of us moved our game purchases to indie games, specifically because they still act like products and not services. Honestly, I'd rather play the original binary instead of some slapped together port to current unity + xcode. At best, the physics or something are slightly off. At worst, the game has major regressions that were introduced by the latest build. I'm probably weird, but I like buying consoles toward the end of their lifecycles. That lets me limit myself to the top fraction of a percent of the games released over the last five-ish years, and still have a dozen titles to play.
lupire 4y ago
Looks like Apple is exposing nasty bugs in Unity's failures to maintain compatibility with old source code.

668 points by keleftheriou 4y ago

jabthedang 4y ago

exabrial 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

productceo 4y ago

Expecting to be an unpopular opinion, but this also seems like an effective way to enforce maintenance and progress. If a good app is no longer maintained, this will release space for new enterprising developers to come in and fill.

userbinator 4y ago

I have binaries from early 90s (small utilities) that I wrote back then and still use today, and they do not need changed because they are truly done and bug-free. Thank Microsoft and IBM (PC) for backwards compatibility, it's a good thing I made the choice back then to stay away from Apple. Fuck forced obolescence and this idiotic notion that constant change is somehow necessary. It's only necessary to feed out-of-control corporate greed. If Apple had its way with everything, we'd probably all have to buy new appliances and rewire/rebuild our houses every few years because nothing would be compatible with anything older. Do not want.

scarface74 4y ago
Yes, Apple should have built in emulators for 68K, PPC, 32 bit x86 and 64 bit x86 applications.
Handytinge 4y ago
I have many games and apps built for older versions of Windows that do not work. How is this forcrd obolescense? This has 0 impact on those who already have the software downloaded onto their device. It's worth noting that Google do the same thing on the play store. It seems your issue is less about the facts of the matter at hand, and more broadly a dislike of Apple.

butz 4y ago

Is there any effort going into iOS game preservation? Or current mobile games are just not worth it?

butz 4y ago

Could it be easier just to rewrite this game on web technologies and build a hybrid app for App Store? As a bonus it will work as PWA on any device (if author wishes to publish is like that), and future updates will be much easier.

infogulch 4y ago

How much is this about being 'fresh' or using new OS features vs running old apps through their changed policies and app submission screening process?

almostdigital 4y ago

I think it has to do with swift runtime deprecations. I have an objective-c app that is as old as the AppStore and I haven't updated it for 8 years [1], Apple even updated it once themselves somehow to support iOS 11. Another of my apps was removed with a similar vague explanation as the OP got and it was written using Swift [2]. While I understand that they might want to drop support for old runtimes the 30-day deadline is ridiculous. And if you miss it you need to re-submit the app and lose your ratings etc. I made nowhere near enough in the ~2 year period my app was available to justify spending the effort to modernize the project so I just let them remove it... [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/seismometer/id288966259 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/seismometer/id288966259 [2]: https://github.com/jnordberg/triggy https://github.com/jnordberg/triggy

gardaani 4y ago
Does anyone have a Swift app without updates for more than 2 years on the App Store?

sorry_outta_gas 4y ago

live by the store, die by the store

bobthechef 4y ago

mensetmanusman 4y ago

If Apple were cool they would have a boneyard section of the App Store where digital archeologists could sift through every abandoned app. Maybe they could implement a 20 year policy where it becomes possible for the community to try to fix things that Apple breaks through forced updates.

awinter-py 4y ago

> while performing worse on old devices ^ feels key. as a perpetual old device user it feels like platforms are continuously degrading the value of my hardware with updates, perhaps unintentionally through changes to hardware acceleration, sometimes intentionally like apple's throttling not surprised developers feel just as squeezed

hardsoftnfloppy 4y ago

jdrc 4y ago

by analogy, youtube should pull all the videos that are not at least 1080p

yessirwhatever 4y ago

Requiring software to use the latest versions of their SDK is not an excessive request. You're welcome to not publishing your apps on App store.

endgame 4y ago

I considered going into phone apps, and reversed course after Jobs' attempt to limit the set of languages one could code in. I have never regretted the decision, and wish other devs would stop building on such unstable foundations.

hapiri 4y ago

Maybe a change in IP legals that can force corporations to open source deprecated platforms can help preserving these cultural artefacts.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

interpol_p 4y ago

This has also happened to me with three games I have worked on (published 2010, 2012, and 2015) I updated the most popular one to keep it on the store, and made it much better in the process. It didn't support modern iPads with rounded corners, and I updated some of the menus and fixed a few small but long-standing bugs In all it was a good thing that something got me to make an effort on keeping my stuff polished. It took about two days, but I ended up with a much cleaner git repo, fixed build issues, and better media and copy for the store presence As for the other two games? I was happy to let them go. They were beyond my ability to update for modern hardware. I'd rather not have them publicly available than running in some half-assed compatibility mode for modern hardware I suspect I'm in the minority, but I like being forced to keep my active software actually actively maintained

makecheck 4y ago

The worst part of all of this is that their stores DO have heaping mountains of apps that should be removed: the outright scams, the useless apps full of trackers, etc. Absolutely no effort whatsoever is being placed into removing things that are truly harmful. There is a very clear hierarchy here, and it isn’t “developers first” or even “developers 7th”. Instead, it is: whatever makes an absurdly rich company even richer is A-OK, the “curated experience” will be sure of that.

exodust 4y ago

I hope web pages are never removed from servers on the basis of last modified date! I wonder what is the etiquette for devs in their update notes, when there's no other change except this pulse update? Describe it accurately or slap a generic 'bug fixes' label on?

keleftheriou 4y ago

Similar to the author of the tweet, Apple removed a working version of my FlickType Keyboard that catered specifically to the visually impaired community, just because I hadn't updated it in 2 years. Meanwhile, games like Pocket God have not been updated for 7 years now: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pocket-god/id301387274 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pocket-god/id301387274

ceejayoz 4y ago
Can you just add a Marshawn Lynch-style "I'm just here so I don't get fined" line of text to the app's "about" page and call it a day? Or are you gonna have to make major changes to update to the latest versions of iOS?
- keleftheriou 4y ago
  Having to use the latest Xcode to build and submit the app is often already a big enough headache, due to how many things Apple changes between versions. Another example from someone else: "That literally happened to us. Boss wants to change our iOS game icon. Changing icon requires a new build. A new build requires iPhone X support. iPhone X build target requires Xcode 9. Xcode 9 requires macOS 10.12. OS update breaks old Unity3D. Upgrading Unity breaks build." https://twitter.com/aaefiikmnnnr/status/931222777301835782 https://twitter.com/aaefiikmnnnr/status/931222777301835782
  - chii 4y ago
    > A new build requires iPhone X support so the existing build doesn't support iphone X? Isn't this a good reason for apple to push your app out because they want all their apps to support their latest phones?
    - lostmsu 4y ago
      Reason? Maybe. A good one? I don't think so.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fsflover 4y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31135278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31135278

TheJoeMan 4y ago

LowStakesConspiracy: Apple needs to keep developers buying newer Macbooks / iPhones.

viro 4y ago
Or they don't want customers downloading apps that don't properly support their devices. makes the customer experience suck.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  The customer-breaking changes are coming from Apple, not the app developers. If Apple is so concerned about customer experience, they can just as well choose not to break existing apps. The "customer experience" excuse hasn't held water in decades.
  - Someone 4y ago
    I think it has. On Windows, famous for its backwards compatibility, you still have software that shows ancient dialogs, have graphics at a resolution for 640×480 monitors, or that work with 8.3 file names, and only with those (so, you can’t save docs with long names, and have to guess at the short names of files and directories with long names) Yes, banning such apps is a loss for the customer experience of being able to run such applications, but there are disadvantages, too. For many of those applications, users would be happier _if_ those applications were maintained and adjusted to modern hardware and new OS capabilities. Now, of course, that’s an _if_. Apple makes a different choice than Microsoft there. They think losing applications isn’t a big problem (presumably as long as replacements exist, but even that isn’t strictly necessary for some tools. The public at large can do without a Kermit program or RSS reader, for example, because it has alternative ways to download files or access news)
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      1) The customer who does not need a Kermit app is not forced to use one. Nor even are they forced to live with a crappy OS just so that old apos can keep working. The customer who does need a Kermit app, is forced to live without. 2) Even worse, they are forced to live without even though the work was done to create one and they had it yesterday. This is not all explained my mere inevitable and unavoidable compatibility creep, nor by the sensible goal not to be Microsoft with their mountains of Rube Goldberg code to deal with countless obscure backwards compatibility quirks. That will make things break eventually, but this an arbitrary and voluntary choice driven by goals other than serving the needs of users as well as possible in trade for their money. Apple values their appearance and their revenue stream above all else. Setting aside malware and other demonstrably legitimate security topics, because we aren't talking about apps that are no longer safe to use for some reason, or that are no longer compatible with the OS because of security-related changes in the OS.: Purging all apps that are "ugly" or have any sort of undesired ux, or that aren't generating income for Apple one way or another, benefits Apple, not the users. The users would prfectly happily simply not use an app that sucked. If any are using it, then it must be supplying some function that the user wants. Whatever that function is, obviously it matters more to the user than any of the excuses for removing it. It only benefits Apple to purge them, not the user, and it's not a case of "What's good for Apple is good for is good for all Apple users" I don't claim it's just Apple either. Google increasingly does the same thing, just a bit less.

pjmlp 4y ago

On the other side the grass has the same colour. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2022/04/expanding-plays-target-level-api-requirements-to-strengthen-user-security.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2022/04/expanding-... It sucks, but this is what happens when platform vendors don't want to play the Microsoft's card of backwards compatibility to keep old applications going. Also a way to force adoption of new APIs, even if they are irrelevant for many applications.

noobermin 4y ago
At this point, I see no other option other than lobbying your congressmembers to regulate SV companies finally. Now companies are enforcing the uptake of new APIs for no real purpose? Half of the churn is just to pad googler pedigree and advance within the company, it is a shame they are enforcing that culture on their users.
- mmis1000 4y ago
  For google, it is mostly for fighting against random api abused usage in China apps. China apps can always find a new way to abuse apis that mean to enhance the user experience to tracking and data stealing.
- scarface74 4y ago
  So you want the government to come in and force software platforms to maintain backwards compatibility forever?
  - hda2 4y ago
    No, just ban software stores from removing working apps for no good reason.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      So you want the government to come up with “good reasons”? Would a “good reason” be that Apple stopped supporting 32 bit hardware? An app didn’t support new display sizes? The notch?

kbd 4y ago

What. I still play Super Hexagon occasionally and I’ve had that game on my phone for like 10 years. Checked, was last updated in 2018: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/super-hexagon/id549027629 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/super-hexagon/id549027629

jobs_throwaway 4y ago

aSithLord 4y ago

only a user having the choice to sideload or not can solve the issues of the AppStore.

kerng 4y ago

This is very bad news for indies, and will help large companies push them out. I have games in AppStore not updated for many years. They work well on all devices, I also consider them to be a piece of art. And feedback is very positive! Getting anxious that Apple will pull it. Releasing a new version sounds easy, but it's a significant time effort (chain of dependencies, build environments and game engines are complex) with 0 value to anyone - because it is perfect and a piece of art. Why don't they have better options for discovery, rather than saying "old is bad". I have comments from people saying my game is their favorite childhood game and they have they have fond memories and stuff - and they are happy to play it now once in a while even. Apple logic makes zero sense, it's like destroying books or paintings and stuff.

Crabber 4y ago
Calling something "art" doesn't magically make it immune to decay. Paintings have to be restored, books have to be reprinted. If your art is so cherished to you and other people then surely that should give you even more motivation to spend time ensuring that it is preserved into the future, no?
- Tams80 4y ago
  They only comparable decay is bit rot.
- hedora 4y ago
  "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
  - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
    Try to remember that you're talking about a video game that's considered abandoned, and that the author is allowed to re-upload it to keep it up This is actually because the author doesn't want to do small labor, not because people are being silenced or murdered

ianlevesque 4y ago

I am having trouble summoning the outrage I see in the other comment threads here. The App Store is stuffed full of abandonware. Apple should be more aggressive with this, not less. If you can't recompile your app and patch up support for recent OSes and recent devices on an ongoing basis, then your business model is not sustainable. I know, I used to sell iOS apps. The market right now is absolutely flooded with indie games, some light pruning is probably for the best.

gcheong 4y ago
If they actually gave any indication of what exactly they think needs to be updated other than the age of the app I would tend to agree but if an app is considered complete and running fine on current devices then it’s not abandonware.
gameswithgo 4y ago
Aulig 4y ago
iOS and Android usually have perfect backwards compatibility, so there's no technical reason to require a new build. The apps work perfectly fine on new devices automatically.
- scarface74 4y ago
  iOS does not have “perfect backward compatibility”.
Tams80 4y ago
I hope that boot's tasty.
seba_dos1 4y ago
> then your business model is not sustainable As if that was the concern there at all. Most people who publish free games consider them "art", not "business model".
4y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I have had many apps (over 20) on the store, since 2012. I haven't had any that has weathered the OS changes past a couple of major steps, without having to make some code changes (sometimes, nothing more than just recompiling with the latest toolchains). I just put out an update to my very first app, which is ten years old, but I have done a few updates, since first releasing it. I have another app that is about two years old, and it needs a facelift. I don't have the bandwidth to give it said facelift (It still works, but looks like crap). I hope it won't get pulled before I can give it its update. I won't blame Apple, if they do pull it, however (see "looks like crap," above). I've generally retired most of my apps, when they got long in the tooth.

gentle 4y ago

This is exactly why I refuse to buy any ios apple that cost more than $1. They're inevitably going away. This is also why the iPad is never going to replace a computer for me. Any productivity ecosystem I create for myself is just going to break after a couple of OS updates.

phonebucket 4y ago
But what's the rationale behind this specific $1 limit? If something were to keep me entertained for several hours with no advertising, I'd certainly consider that worth $1. Going down the free route would likely end me drowning in a sea of advertisements.
nyuszika7h 4y ago
Generally, even if an app gets removed from the App Store, you can still redownload it anytime if you've previously purchased it. The only exception is egregious cases where the developer's account gets terminated. But even then, if you backed up the app's IPA in advance, you can reinstall it anytime. (This is distinct from sideloading, as an Apple-signed IPA is encrypted and tied to your Apple ID but has no expiry date.)

DaveSapien 4y ago

This has happened to me also (indie game dev) a few years ago. The number is about 20 or so games that have been removed by Apple because they hadn't been updated in two years. The worked perfectly fine on all the new hardware/software and even work today. On top of that, I know that there is another 30 or so apps I was involved in with clients that have also been removed. These weren't the biggest apps/games in the world, but they were all high quality finished products that had nothing wrong with them. Its just the cost of re-publishing each one out-weighed the return, so I didn't have much of a choice sadly. I do have plans to re-publish some of them, however they have to take a back seat for current work. All that to say, I have a large part of my portfolio of work that is no longer available to the public, which just sucks.

septillianator 4y ago
Seems like there is justification in Seperating them into an archive appstore/section at least.
Aeolun 4y ago
Now ask how much it costs shovelware authors to republish their apps, and they probably do it all the time because the quality sucks.. Guess this ‘remove all the great apps that don’t need to be updated’ strategy is going to backfire.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Is it more profitable in the short term?
- hugi 4y ago
  A better strategy would be to allow app publishers to log in and indicate in some way that the app is still "good" and active. Now I have to make a "fake update" to a perfectly fine app because of this. Of course the best strategy would be to just don't do this at all. I find it offensive that a single company can decide on a whim to erase my perfectly fine software from history, because it's "ancient" in their opinion (two years old).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mysterydip 4y ago

This is exactly why I wanted to leave Apple's ecosysyem for my games and go pure HTML5. Attention and updates (XCode, OS) needed just to keep an app up, not worth the time for me.

bfelbo 4y ago
Yeah, HTML5 is incredible in that way. How much effort would it be for you to convert your iOS games to HTML5? Very curious as we’re building a mobile-focused platform for HTML5 games that make it easy to make your game social. I’d love to help save some of these great iOS games being removed.

gameswithgo 4y ago

mdoms 4y ago

Stop tending other peoples' gardens. Especially trillion dollar companies' ones. No sympathy here, we all know the drill by now.

clintonb 4y ago
> Stop targeting the two largest mobile platforms to gain customers and revenue. That’s my paraphrasing of your statements. If the customers are in the garden, you have to go to the garden. That’s easier than building your own.
gcheong 4y ago
I will the day the US gets serious about cracking down on monopolies and I have several gardens to choose from or can start my own.
throwaway14356 4y ago
Its just rude to support such eco system. As an experiment i tried an iphone4. Apple support helped register an account which didnt work any more for multiple reasons, the app store works just fine, you just cant get any software. Clicking on download does dl the apps but then it says you must upgrade your OS. There is no software! Developers say they have a version for it but you may not install apple says. What kind of deal is that? Its a good device, it could have all kinds of applications.
- scarface74 4y ago
  The iPhone 4 is not a “good device”. It’s 3G only and the networks have already announced that they are completely shutting down 3G networks by the end of the year.
  - ratww 4y ago
    Sure, but it could still be used as a wifi-only device. I have an old iPhone 8 that I keep around for music and streaming to a TV.

dheera 4y ago

Yeah I used to have a bunch of (mostly Android Wear) apps on the Google store but they started getting deleted one by one, they kept having new policies that you needed to follow to have your app stay up. I have a dayjob and don't have time for that shit. Pay me and I'll do it.

w0mbat 4y ago

It’s not hard to do a recompile with a slightly newer SDK, check things still work, update the version and copyright and re-upload. That’s how I keep all my apps in the store. Often you find a cheap update you ought to make, like add dark mode support which wasn’t a thing when the app was written. Sometimes you take the app across a tech boundary, like adding ARM code to a Mac app. I can see Apple’s motivation to keep fresh goods on their shelves that work with current OS versions and hardware.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
Some apps are feature-complete.
- w0mbat 4y ago
  No app is feature complete on a changing platform. The OS changes and the new hardware is different. Assumptions made years ago no longer hold. One of my apps has been in the store for 10 years (Mac & iOS) and I have had to make many updates to keep it fresh. (Adding Retina support to the 3d rendering code and the picture assets, going 64 bit on iOS, dark mode, adding ARM to Mac, replacing deprecated API use, etc, etc.). These changes are in addition to updates that fixed bugs or added actual new app features and are part of the cost of doing business.
newbalance 4y ago
It's hours of work - recompile, test, publish, test again once new versions hits the App Store. Upgrades and maintenance are a bigger time sink than most consider. And this assumes there aren't any new issues that need fixing during the maintenance.
capableweb 4y ago
Games are immensely more complex than your average run-of-the-mill smartphone application. As the author of the submission tweet themselves say: > Now I need to dig up my project file, update the Unity version to make sure it meets the App Store requirements, rebuild, retest, resubmit all to get the exact same game in the exact same place it was before. From my own experience, updating the Unity version tends to not be hassle-free, especially if it's a major version. Updating xcode tends to be a hassle as well, if not outright impossible unless you keep buying new Apple hardware too. And why is the onus on the developers to update apps just for the sake of updating them? Can things not just be "done" anymore? There doesn't seem to be any specific reasons except "we like fresh updates" provided for why the updates should be done. If it works, why remove it? Are they running out of space? Are people being fooled by the application somehow?

keleftheriou 4y ago

Meanwhile, some of Apple's own apps haven't been updated for much longer than that – example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/itunes-movie-trailers/id471966214 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/itunes-movie-trailers/id471966... Rules for thee, but not for me!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mentos 4y ago
For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law!
capableweb 4y ago
It's almost like actively creating and running a market while also participating in it makes you gain unfair advantage. Who would have thought?
- giveupitscrazy 4y ago
  A company could be perfectly capable of running a market without taking an unfair advantage on their own products. Apple is using terrible business practices here. Valve as an example runs steam with their own games, and also with paid community created remakes of their games sold on their same platform, they exemplify what I would expect from Apple, epic, Google, etc.
tessierashpool 4y ago
lupire 4y ago
I see the data feed is stale, but how do you know the build is stale?
- ImprobableTruth 4y ago
  The version history mentions the last update. >1.4.4 Nov 3, 2017

layer8 4y ago

I was disappointed when I had to stop using the iSSH app because it wasn’t ported to 64 bits, since the author had died. Now I guess it wouldn’t have helped much if the app had already been 64 bits. Stuff like this is why I would be in favor of alternative app stores.

ianlevesque 4y ago
Or switch to Prompt, which is actively maintained by one of the best iOS/macOS developers out there.
- tedunangst 4y ago
  Uh, well... I bought prompt. Version 1. Which they quickly discontinued and delisted. I'm not paying again for prompt 2.
- layer8 4y ago
  I have, out of necessity, but there were some features I liked iSSH better for. The other “important” app I lost to the 64-bit transition was Mr. Driller. ;)

nyuszika7h 4y ago

2 years is definitely too early, especially considering they're doing this to developers who are continuing to pay them $99/year to keep their apps up. The iPhone X came out 5 years ago, that was about the last time an update was needed to not look bad on newer devices. Some other commenters here fail to understand that many games are simply completed and don't need much updates to keep working on newer devices, especially if they purposely use minimalistic graphics. Even for regular apps pruning them after 2 years is a bit excessive but it's slightly more understandable there as they'll feel dated more quickly.

Bluecobra 4y ago

Just append “2022” to your game’s name and update the copyright. I just played a “new” Pool & Snooker 2022 game in Apple Arcade and it looks and plays like Pool & Snooker 2012. The copyright says 2012-2022 so I assume the devs just lazily update the name each year and nothing more. Not seeing 10 years of improvement in this. Some of the graphics still don’t even have anti-aliasing…

thewebcount 4y ago

I understand being upset with Apple at this arbitrary cutoff. But can we also talk about why a recompile isn’t as simple as opening the old project and hitting “compile”? I work on a large project (millions of lines of code), which has been in continuous development for 20 years. Every new compiler or IDE release results in us having to dedicate at least one engineer full time for a few days to get our project compiling again with the new tools before the team can switch over. That’s a project that previously compiled with no errors or warnings (because we set warnings are errors to true) suddenly can’t build. It’s ridiculous! I can’t imagine throwing something like Unity in on top of that.

ploxiln 4y ago
-Werror is your mistake here. You can still fix warnings when you see them with a new compiler, without using -Werror to cause complete build failures except with a specific set of specially accommodated compiler versions.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  LOL! If only. We started out that way and nobody fixed their warnings. The only way to make it happen was to make it so they couldn’t compile with warnings. (And we do selectively turn off certain warnings that aren’t helpful and give false positives.) To be clear, I’m not talking about having to clean up a few new warnings with a new compiler release. That’s fine and probably a good thing. We really have to have one of our top engineers dive into it for several days to get things in shape. It just seems really weird to me.
  - erik_seaberg 4y ago
    A code review tool should display warnings, and reviewers should expect fixes for real problems that show up that way (and suppression of false positives).
SilasX 4y ago
I was really upset when I ran into this problem with Docker. Like, I thought the whole point of virtualization was that, no matter how old it is, it will Just Work, so long as the virtualization software works, and it has enough resources. It’s supposed to sidestep the problem having to constantly patch everything that might have changed since. Then one day, our startup brought some new employees on, who read the README and ran the indicated Docker command … and it failed with a mysterious bug requiring dev resources to debug! The exact thing you try to avoid by freezing the machine environment. It turned out that Docker had silently pushed a backward-incompatible change in the format of docker-compose YAML files.

aeturnum 4y ago

As with so many Apple policies this is perfectly understandable but becomes unacceptable because they monopolize access to applications on their platform.

amelius 4y ago

There is one thing worse than government regulation: having your market regulated by a company.

kazinator 4y ago

If you want to make stuff for the people who chose to impose the Apple platform between you and them, that's what you deal with. It's a choice. Maybe the breaking churn in Apple is what brings the novelty seekers, and their money. Unity and whatever breaking and not running well on older hardware has to do with people buying new hardware. Those are the people who bring the money to the table, which is what you must want a piece of if you have your neck in that toilet bowl.

m34 4y ago

At some point it makes sense to update even if the content itself is "complete": supporting newer screen resolutions natively (instead of going with some kind of fallback behavior), making sure all the outdated and long since sunset 3rd party SDK calls don't cause crashes etc. Also if you managed to build, prepare (App Store metadata in different resolutions etc), submit and finally get your app shipped to the end user that was no small feat a couple of years ago. Probably not a very useful skillset to have if you only do it very infrequently (read: waste of time). Requiring additional screenshots, icon sizes, universal app (iPhone+iPad, also supporting split view), new copy for different types of meta (e.g app sub title) for all the locales you probably had translated externally at some point, new privacy guidelines etc.. all not very attractive to get into even if not forced to update like this, especially if you lose your ratings in the process.

Jyaif 4y ago
> supporting newer screen resolutions natively That's not the case anymore, but yes during the first ten years of iOS you had to recompile and resubmit your app to support new screen resolutions. That was incredibly dumb. Even Android did not do this mistake.

vimy 4y ago

This happened to my sticker app. Simple iMessage stickers. The stickers are done and I have no desire to add more. What is there to update? … I can’t wait until Apple is forced to add third party stores.

ronenlh 4y ago

Similar current Twitter thread on the same issue: https://twitter.com/lazerwalker/status/1517849201148932096?s=21&t=WmfisrahF3xRfAl967K7Lg https://twitter.com/lazerwalker/status/1517849201148932096?s...

bricemo 4y ago

As a game developer I’ve always been saddened by the ephemeral nature of games. It seems impossible to make a game that would last 20, 50, 100 years. Books, paintings, even movies have such an advantage

refactor_master 4y ago
That’s not strictly true. There are multiple examples of e.g. Sony and Nintendo re-re-re-releasing old games that are easily 20 years old. But the comparison isn’t entirely fair. If you were to compare a game to a concert or a festival, as an “ephemeral cultural performance by a large group of people” you could also argue that a festival lasts for a set number of days, until it’s gone, forever.
- ronsor 4y ago
  Arguably the best way to make a game that'll last "forever" is to target some old console that has plenty of emulators available. If you make a PS1 game in 2022, I guarantee there will still be an emulator that can run it 20 years from now.
hedora 4y ago
Almost all commercially released games that are over 20 years old run fine on current cell phones or one of these: https://retrododo.com/best-retro-handhelds/ https://retrododo.com/best-retro-handhelds/ Software archival is not that hard unless the ecosystem is specifically designed to prevent it.
rdsnsca 4y ago
Klondike has been running on Macs since 1984 and iOS since 2009 as iKlondike. Source: https://casteel.org/Pages/Narrative.html https://casteel.org/Pages/Narrative.html
randyrand 4y ago
you just gotta develop a game for a stable platform. N64, GC, Wii, NES, all of their games still run on modern hardware. Webapps will probably fair pretty well too. As does Win32, Wine, Proton. Your choice of stable platforms is actually pretty big in the game world! Pretty much every platform except native mobile!

TheChaplain 4y ago

We need independent appstores where developers can distribute their work as they see fit.

simonbarker87 4y ago

I received an email this morning saying the same about one of my apps, it hasn’t got any crash reports, still gets downloads after 5 years, doesn’t need a v2 and Apple decide it’s time to go. Due to swift version changes I don’t have time to push a meaningful change as it doesn’t compile any more.

aendruk 4y ago

I’m personally banned from selling on Amazon “due to inactivity”. In college Amazon advertised on campus that you could sell your textbooks, so I did that. Now, years later, they advertise “Sell Your Stuff”—but too bad, in the interim my account was closed without notice and there’s no appeal, and no way to open a new one.

emsy 4y ago

It’s fine. I mean Apple refunds you if the App you bought gets removed, right?

xwdv 4y ago

> I'm sitting here on a Friday night, working myself to to bone after my day job, trying my best to scrape a living from my indie games, trying to keep up with Apple, Google, Unity, Xcode, MacOS changes that happen so fast my head spins while performing worse on older devices. I can’t help but shake my head when Indie game devs unload these sob stories trying to garner support. If it’s so hard for you then just stop making games. I often get this whiff of entitlement from indies that we should be supporting them because they are small, often one man operations. Or that because they invested so much time and money building a game, they should deserve to get that back through sales. But the world doesn’t need more indie game devs, the world needs better games. I doubt a game that hasn’t been updated in 2 years is any good or doesn’t have a million competitor clones by now.

ratww 4y ago
> I doubt a game that hasn’t been updated in 2 years is any good or doesn’t have a million competitor clones by now. That statement doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Games can be "finished products". Do you also think that movies and songs that haven't been updated aren't good? There are plenty of games from the 80s, 90s, 2000s that are still selling today, in unmodified form, running via emulators. And clones are 99.9% pure garbage that don't replace the real thing.
- xwdv 4y ago
  Games stopped acting like products long ago, and are now expected to be as a service.
  - hedora 4y ago
    But at that point, a bunch of us moved our game purchases to indie games, specifically because they still act like products and not services. Honestly, I'd rather play the original binary instead of some slapped together port to current unity + xcode. At best, the physics or something are slightly off. At worst, the game has major regressions that were introduced by the latest build. I'm probably weird, but I like buying consoles toward the end of their lifecycles. That lets me limit myself to the top fraction of a percent of the games released over the last five-ish years, and still have a dozen titles to play.

lupire 4y ago

Looks like Apple is exposing nasty bugs in Unity's failures to maintain compatibility with old source code.