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> So I had to spend four hours on Saturday upgrading all my platform libraries simply so that I could compile the damn app. I sort of assume this is the actual

> So I had to spend four hours on Saturday upgrading all my platform libraries simply so that I could compile the damn app. I sort of assume this is the actual point? Apple presumably wants to drop support for older versions of the SDKs, and that requires that app developers update to the newer versions. I think you can make a reasonable argument that dumping work on third-party developers to simplify things for themselves is bad, but the author's belief that it was simply pointless busywork is probably incorrect from Apple's perspective. I suspect the minimum download threshold to be exempt from this is _very_ high. Maintaining backwards compatibility for a small fixed set of apps doing things an old way is a categorically different problem from maintaining backwards compatibility for every app out there.

bsuvc 4y ago
This is a great point, but if true, Apple should do a better job of communicating the reason, including specifics, not just say "your app is rejected because it is outdated".
dahfizz 4y ago
If they have specific libraries or APIs that they wanted to deprecate, I think developers would understand that. But the current implementation of "anything 2 years old is too old" is arbitrary. If this was really about deprecation, they wouldn't have a "minimum monthly downloads" exemption either. This policy is just a way to clear out old, unpopular apps from the store
- tomxor 4y ago
  > This policy is just a way to clear out old, unpopular apps from the store Except popularity doesn't correlate with utility when it comes to apps. Probably only addictive games and social network apps will pass whatever arbitrary threshold has been set. This will harm any one off apps built to satisfy a niche purpose downloaded by a small set of users. Which Apple probably think are not important, like all of the little high street shops, except cumulatively they might affect a majority of users. Also if it's measured by "downloads" rather than "installed", then it could take out larger more widely used apps that are considered complete by both authors and users, but don't have enough daily new users to pop up on their radar as important enough... this is similar to the "maintenance" fallacy of NPM, where frequent patches = better, even though if your package is small and well written you should be making no patches as a sign of quality.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Traditionally, this is a significant philosophical difference between Apple and Microsoft that goes quite a ways towards explaining how Microsoft gained and held dominance for so long in the business sector. Businesses don't want to be told that their working software needs to be updated to make a vendor's bottom-line cheaper. They recognize cost-shifting when they see it and respond by backing towards the exits. Microsoft maintained a philosophy for decades that it was their responsibility to, if at all possible, maintain backwards compatibility with older Windows software as a market differentiator. The primary times I remember them breaking this policy were security related. (That having been said, I got out of active development of Windows software around Windows 8, so this may have changed).
  - skrtskrt 4y ago
    it seems like that on a long enough timeline however, promising that legacy cruft will always keep crufting as it did before seems like a huge burden that leaks into your ability to deliver quality in your current offerings. Sure there are old things that are good and "complete" but far more old stuff is just old and could well be burnt to the ground, except for the fact that you have some customer somewhere relying on its oddities and unintended behaviors as an essential feature of their integrations.
    - bruce511 4y ago
      I feel you are arguing for real harm now, versus potential harm in the future. There's no sign that being very-backward-compatible is holding Windows back that I can see. In the other hand I have collected a set of utilities into my work-flow that are easily 20+ years old, and they all work fine. The last major cull from Microsoft was that 16bit programs ceased to work on 64 bit platforms. Other than that I've never had an app fail. Most of those utility supplies have long since disappeared, retired, or died. But I can still keep transferring those apps to the next machine and they keep running. None of this impacts the quality of my current offerings. Ultimately all this costs me is some cheap disk space.
      - greyhair 4y ago
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > But the current implementation of "anything 2 years old is too old" is arbitrary. To an extent, but the reality is that an unacceptably-large percentage of apps that are 2+ years old are not correctly handling current screen sizes and reserved sensor areas. > This policy is just a way to clear out old, unpopular apps from the store. Great. This is the kind of active culling/editing an app store requires to remain vibrant.
  - bruce511 4y ago
    Yes, I agree. All users should be forced to re-evaluate all the apps they are using everytime they get a new device. It doesn't matter if that tool you currently use is perfect, or the game you play is just fun as-it-is, it is clearly harmful to you (and makes the app store "less vibrant". Everything older than 2 years must go. Crumbs, everything older than 1 year should go... Nay make that 1 month... Who cares if users like an old app, "vibrancy" matters most. /s
- scarface74 4y ago
  If she had to spend time getting it to work with the newest version of XCode, there are probably APIs that are being deprecated.
- zuminator 4y ago
  It's a way to clear out old apps that don't make money. A freeware app can be quite popular but won’t get updated if the developer as moved on to other jobs and can't continue to devote unpaid labor toward their passion project. In order to afford to keep maintaining it, they may have to move a happily free app toward a subscription or ad-supported model. And Apple's forced updates are nudging people in that direction. It reminds me of a class I once took where the professor stated that some colonial governments would go into tribal areas, claim land ownership, and start taxing the indigenous people. And because these people now owed taxes, they had to give up their lifestyle, enter the workforce, and participate in the money economy whether they wanted to or not. I don't know if that scenario is historically accurate but it certainly is analogous to Apple's policy. Developers who might not even want to make money are being compelled to do so or see their apps get pulled, because forced updates amount to a tax that must be paid.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > forced updates amount to a tax that must be paid. It's not a tax that must be paid. The developer can simply discontinue the older app, and not have to pay anything. So your analogy doesn't apply. Switching an app from free to paid is a lot more work than recompiling and updating the app. There's a ton of coding and infrastructure you have to do. So it's not really saving you anything. The work of switching is a large upfront cost, which might not pay off, because apps don't magically sell themselves, you have to market them (which costs money!). This is especially a problem if you already have an app with low download numbers and low consumer awareness.
lapcat 4y ago
> I suspect the minimum download threshold to be exempt from this is _very_ high. You can suspect based on no evidence, but nobody knows, and Apple refuses to say. The crazy thing is, if Apple truly wants to drop support for older version of the SDKs, then how in the world does it make sense to exempt the most used apps???
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  My guess is the income from a reduced subset of apps offsets special maintenance for only those parts of the old SDKs which that subset uses. Likely as a cost saving measure. Apple may even ask for support contracts beyond some point, to motivate those apps to update too.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > My guess is the income from a reduced subset of apps offsets special maintenance for only those parts of the old SDKs which that subset uses. Again, a guess based on zero empirical evidence. Also, Apple's "rule" here makes no distinction between paid and free apps. Indeed, free apps tend to have more downloads than paid apps, which means that Apple would be targeting the wrong apps if they were looking to offset costs.
    - paulryanrogers 4y ago
      Do the free apps not have in app purchases? Or ad revenue which must be shared with Apple?
      - lapcat 4y ago
        Some do, some don't. Why are you asking me, have you not ever seen the App Store?
        paulryanrogers 4y ago
        Not in many years
dheera 4y ago
I've had a few apps on the Google Play Store automatically removed because I didn't update them for some new policy or some such. If they paid me maybe I would have. Otherwise I don't have time to keep dealing with their requests every 6 months. Is it such a hard thing to ask that if shit works, just leave it be?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway292939 4y ago
I agree that this may be the point. Software changes, and being able to compile with latest libraries is somewhat of a minimum requirement. To Apple's defense, are they supposed to wait until the app breaks, starts receiving many complaints from customers, before it triggers the review process for them (which they would be forced to look at as somewhat high priority) before they then take action to remove the offending app? That hurts the customer experience from their perspective. Better for them to institute a policy preemptively addressing these issues (arbitrary as the timeframe may be). And four hours is a good chunk of time, but what percent of time is it compared to the amount of time for the app to be designed and implemented in the first place?
- lapcat 4y ago
  > To Apple's defense, are they supposed to wait until the app breaks, starts receiving many complaints from customers Except that Apple is exempting apps with more downloads, and only punishing apps with fewer downloads, which is the opposite of worrying about "many complaints".
  - throwaway292939 4y ago
    This is still in line with their thinking from a prioritization perspective. For an app with more downloads, they can dedicate more labor/resources to it.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      > For an app with more downloads, they can dedicate more labor/resources to it. What resources? For older apps with more downloads, Apple is doing exactly what you said they shouldn't do: wait until the app breaks, and start receiving many complaints from customers.
sriku 4y ago
My prof just ran a Win32 programs written 20+ years ago on today's Windows. At least someone is paying attention to backward compatibility.
- nicky0 4y ago
  Windows even emulates bugs from old version of Windows for specific old apps so they don't break due to the bug having been fixed.
- scarface74 4y ago
  How well are those Win32 apps working on Windows mobile?
lytefm 4y ago
> The intention behind Apple and Google’s policies is to force developers to make sure their apps run successfully on the latest devices and operating systems. The intention is to not support old iOS APIs with new versions of XCode and iOS anymore. Apple isn't Microsoft or the Web - very old Windows programs and very old websites still run pretty fine. Apple would rather shift the burden to update and App according to the latest API to the Devs than to provide API support forever.

bsuvc 4y ago

This is a great point, but if true, Apple should do a better job of communicating the reason, including specifics, not just say "your app is rejected because it is outdated".

dahfizz 4y ago

If they have specific libraries or APIs that they wanted to deprecate, I think developers would understand that. But the current implementation of "anything 2 years old is too old" is arbitrary. If this was really about deprecation, they wouldn't have a "minimum monthly downloads" exemption either. This policy is just a way to clear out old, unpopular apps from the store

tomxor 4y ago
> This policy is just a way to clear out old, unpopular apps from the store Except popularity doesn't correlate with utility when it comes to apps. Probably only addictive games and social network apps will pass whatever arbitrary threshold has been set. This will harm any one off apps built to satisfy a niche purpose downloaded by a small set of users. Which Apple probably think are not important, like all of the little high street shops, except cumulatively they might affect a majority of users. Also if it's measured by "downloads" rather than "installed", then it could take out larger more widely used apps that are considered complete by both authors and users, but don't have enough daily new users to pop up on their radar as important enough... this is similar to the "maintenance" fallacy of NPM, where frequent patches = better, even though if your package is small and well written you should be making no patches as a sign of quality.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Traditionally, this is a significant philosophical difference between Apple and Microsoft that goes quite a ways towards explaining how Microsoft gained and held dominance for so long in the business sector. Businesses don't want to be told that their working software needs to be updated to make a vendor's bottom-line cheaper. They recognize cost-shifting when they see it and respond by backing towards the exits. Microsoft maintained a philosophy for decades that it was their responsibility to, if at all possible, maintain backwards compatibility with older Windows software as a market differentiator. The primary times I remember them breaking this policy were security related. (That having been said, I got out of active development of Windows software around Windows 8, so this may have changed).
- skrtskrt 4y ago
  it seems like that on a long enough timeline however, promising that legacy cruft will always keep crufting as it did before seems like a huge burden that leaks into your ability to deliver quality in your current offerings. Sure there are old things that are good and "complete" but far more old stuff is just old and could well be burnt to the ground, except for the fact that you have some customer somewhere relying on its oddities and unintended behaviors as an essential feature of their integrations.
  - bruce511 4y ago
    I feel you are arguing for real harm now, versus potential harm in the future. There's no sign that being very-backward-compatible is holding Windows back that I can see. In the other hand I have collected a set of utilities into my work-flow that are easily 20+ years old, and they all work fine. The last major cull from Microsoft was that 16bit programs ceased to work on 64 bit platforms. Other than that I've never had an app fail. Most of those utility supplies have long since disappeared, retired, or died. But I can still keep transferring those apps to the next machine and they keep running. None of this impacts the quality of my current offerings. Ultimately all this costs me is some cheap disk space.
    - greyhair 4y ago
CharlesW 4y ago
> But the current implementation of "anything 2 years old is too old" is arbitrary. To an extent, but the reality is that an unacceptably-large percentage of apps that are 2+ years old are not correctly handling current screen sizes and reserved sensor areas. > This policy is just a way to clear out old, unpopular apps from the store. Great. This is the kind of active culling/editing an app store requires to remain vibrant.
- bruce511 4y ago
  Yes, I agree. All users should be forced to re-evaluate all the apps they are using everytime they get a new device. It doesn't matter if that tool you currently use is perfect, or the game you play is just fun as-it-is, it is clearly harmful to you (and makes the app store "less vibrant". Everything older than 2 years must go. Crumbs, everything older than 1 year should go... Nay make that 1 month... Who cares if users like an old app, "vibrancy" matters most. /s
scarface74 4y ago
If she had to spend time getting it to work with the newest version of XCode, there are probably APIs that are being deprecated.
zuminator 4y ago
It's a way to clear out old apps that don't make money. A freeware app can be quite popular but won’t get updated if the developer as moved on to other jobs and can't continue to devote unpaid labor toward their passion project. In order to afford to keep maintaining it, they may have to move a happily free app toward a subscription or ad-supported model. And Apple's forced updates are nudging people in that direction. It reminds me of a class I once took where the professor stated that some colonial governments would go into tribal areas, claim land ownership, and start taxing the indigenous people. And because these people now owed taxes, they had to give up their lifestyle, enter the workforce, and participate in the money economy whether they wanted to or not. I don't know if that scenario is historically accurate but it certainly is analogous to Apple's policy. Developers who might not even want to make money are being compelled to do so or see their apps get pulled, because forced updates amount to a tax that must be paid.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > forced updates amount to a tax that must be paid. It's not a tax that must be paid. The developer can simply discontinue the older app, and not have to pay anything. So your analogy doesn't apply. Switching an app from free to paid is a lot more work than recompiling and updating the app. There's a ton of coding and infrastructure you have to do. So it's not really saving you anything. The work of switching is a large upfront cost, which might not pay off, because apps don't magically sell themselves, you have to market them (which costs money!). This is especially a problem if you already have an app with low download numbers and low consumer awareness.

lapcat 4y ago

> I suspect the minimum download threshold to be exempt from this is _very_ high. You can suspect based on no evidence, but nobody knows, and Apple refuses to say. The crazy thing is, if Apple truly wants to drop support for older version of the SDKs, then how in the world does it make sense to exempt the most used apps???

paulryanrogers 4y ago
My guess is the income from a reduced subset of apps offsets special maintenance for only those parts of the old SDKs which that subset uses. Likely as a cost saving measure. Apple may even ask for support contracts beyond some point, to motivate those apps to update too.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > My guess is the income from a reduced subset of apps offsets special maintenance for only those parts of the old SDKs which that subset uses. Again, a guess based on zero empirical evidence. Also, Apple's "rule" here makes no distinction between paid and free apps. Indeed, free apps tend to have more downloads than paid apps, which means that Apple would be targeting the wrong apps if they were looking to offset costs.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Do the free apps not have in app purchases? Or ad revenue which must be shared with Apple?
    - lapcat 4y ago
      Some do, some don't. Why are you asking me, have you not ever seen the App Store?
      - paulryanrogers 4y ago
        Not in many years

dheera 4y ago

I've had a few apps on the Google Play Store automatically removed because I didn't update them for some new policy or some such. If they paid me maybe I would have. Otherwise I don't have time to keep dealing with their requests every 6 months. Is it such a hard thing to ask that if shit works, just leave it be?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

throwaway292939 4y ago

I agree that this may be the point. Software changes, and being able to compile with latest libraries is somewhat of a minimum requirement. To Apple's defense, are they supposed to wait until the app breaks, starts receiving many complaints from customers, before it triggers the review process for them (which they would be forced to look at as somewhat high priority) before they then take action to remove the offending app? That hurts the customer experience from their perspective. Better for them to institute a policy preemptively addressing these issues (arbitrary as the timeframe may be). And four hours is a good chunk of time, but what percent of time is it compared to the amount of time for the app to be designed and implemented in the first place?

lapcat 4y ago
> To Apple's defense, are they supposed to wait until the app breaks, starts receiving many complaints from customers Except that Apple is exempting apps with more downloads, and only punishing apps with fewer downloads, which is the opposite of worrying about "many complaints".
- throwaway292939 4y ago
  This is still in line with their thinking from a prioritization perspective. For an app with more downloads, they can dedicate more labor/resources to it.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > For an app with more downloads, they can dedicate more labor/resources to it. What resources? For older apps with more downloads, Apple is doing exactly what you said they shouldn't do: wait until the app breaks, and start receiving many complaints from customers.

sriku 4y ago

My prof just ran a Win32 programs written 20+ years ago on today's Windows. At least someone is paying attention to backward compatibility.

nicky0 4y ago
Windows even emulates bugs from old version of Windows for specific old apps so they don't break due to the bug having been fixed.
scarface74 4y ago
How well are those Win32 apps working on Windows mobile?

lytefm 4y ago

> The intention behind Apple and Google’s policies is to force developers to make sure their apps run successfully on the latest devices and operating systems. The intention is to not support old iOS APIs with new versions of XCode and iOS anymore. Apple isn't Microsoft or the Web - very old Windows programs and very old websites still run pretty fine. Apple would rather shift the burden to update and App according to the latest API to the Devs than to provide API support forever.