8 ms·

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 y

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
      I have a couple camera apps from the mid 'aughts that were written for Windows XP that still function fine under Windows 10. Same thing with an old photo scanner, that just only recently failed. My last SCSI dependent peripheral. Ran fine on Windows 10, on ancient software, using ancient TWAIN SCSI drivers, until the scanner itself failed. As I moved from XP -> 7 -> 8.1 -> 10, the first thing I did was load up all my old photo software to be sure it would work.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        My father has an ancient scanner from the XP era and the only thing that still works with it is a Windows XP VM he happens to have (I assume later windows could work too, but the XP exists for other reasons and so we continue to connect the scanner to it). Maybe Linux could be beaten to work with it, but this works well enough.
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.

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
    I have a couple camera apps from the mid 'aughts that were written for Windows XP that still function fine under Windows 10. Same thing with an old photo scanner, that just only recently failed. My last SCSI dependent peripheral. Ran fine on Windows 10, on ancient software, using ancient TWAIN SCSI drivers, until the scanner itself failed. As I moved from XP -> 7 -> 8.1 -> 10, the first thing I did was load up all my old photo software to be sure it would work.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      My father has an ancient scanner from the XP era and the only thing that still works with it is a Windows XP VM he happens to have (I assume later windows could work too, but the XP exists for other reasons and so we continue to connect the scanner to it). Maybe Linux could be beaten to work with it, but this works well enough.

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.