App Store Removing Old Apps That Still Work

Removing old games that still work is anti-competitive ammo against Apple Arcade.

This allows Apple to break backwards compatibility faster. It reduces costs by moving work onto everyone else: third party developers get to rewrite stuff that works, but Apple no longer has to maintain their old stuff. By the time programmers have figured out to work around their bugs, their workarounds won't work because the API has been deprecated.

Of course that means companies might want to rely on a third party layer which abstracts away all those shifting sands. Something like Flash... perhaps React? It's ironic that that's what Steve Jobs feared because he thought things like Flash prevented the hardware from being used to its fullest extent, and therefore killed Apple's hardware differentiation.

It also means that any new rule can be enforced on old apps within 2 years. So Apple's rules can be even more capricious than before.

It seems to me to be something that will encourage scams and throw-away apps. What it will kill are small apps written by enthusiasts for specialist niches. It may also disable a lot of "iOS-ready" hardware. So basically something that encourages more consumer items and benefits large corporations that can afford to have people waste time, running in place.

Apple's new motto: "Build your business on shifting sands". It is becoming the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: "My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that."

At the end of the day, the development organization simply doesn’t want to support anything but the latest SDK. Less work. Fewer bugs. Less variability. Good for them, somewhat bad for users, a huge pain for devs.. but that’s the hierarchy of needs: Apple, users, devs.

I wondered why they'd use such a lazy metric (determine cutoff by build age? How about active sales insteads?).

I think Frank's answer solves that [not so convoluted] mystery perfectly.

Strangely, however, the Windows App Store [sic ;^D] did "you haven't updated in a while. Goodbye!" a few years ago without nearly so good a reason. In that case, I just had to look alive and reply to the automatically generated email that the app had been removed and they put my app back.

My app had sales, strangely enough. Not Maserati money, but good pizza & beer/side hustle money. And I didn't make any updates; same version is in there now. So, on some level, though Frank probably wins Occam's Razor in a rational world, ultimately who knows?

Meanwhile, the App Store is filled to the brim with scams that are never removed.

I dunno. I ought to be more bothered by this, but strangely I'm just not. Old apps were never a first-class citizen during the 64-bit transition either, and I've long since stopped stuffing my iDevices with apps and games on a whim. The glory (and fun) days are simply over, and TBH I still can't recognise any period after about iOS 6 that I'd consider particularly memorable or great. The serendipity of just installing shit because you can has also long been called into question because of the sheer quantities of sewage in the store.

Let's face it, iOS isn't the platform for archivists or enthusiasts. It's a revenue generation stream for a willing class of snake-oil salesman. If you want to preserve and enjoy old software, do it in an emulator.

@Sebby

From a developer's viewpoint, it's a little different. It takes a long time to master these platforms. One gets to enjoy various aspects of them because some of the tech is pretty good and unique in some ways (objective-C, Swift, and LIDAR for instance). But then the only jobs are making products that generate revenue "for a willing class of snake-oil salesmen", as you so eloquently put it. That wasn't really what one thought one signed up for. Going Indie is not really an option: at this point, it's just signing up for more headaches.

I had an app that was removed from the Mac App store. I was quite surprised about that, because it was a 32 bit Carbon app and I thought they had removed it a long time ago! (I do have a modern app but that is not being sold thru the Mac App store.)

Using an old SDK triggers compatibility layers in iOS, so I guess they want to remove one of these layers specifically.

I have an app that’s even older and didn’t get an email. So I really think they are looking for usage of a specific API, perhaps something gaming related like OpenGL?

Looks like the EU is going to do some of their own app removal

https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/26/apple_ios_browser/

This will be interesting... EU Versus Tech Titan, round 2.

Be right back, I just have to go add a touchbar that nobody asked for to one of my apps to keep it alive...

@Old Unix Geek

No disagreement there. Of course Apple mistreats developers, and ultimately, developers are users too. The problem is, the incentives are all wrong, so they increasingly optimise for "bottom-of-the-barrel" growth tactics, which Apple are ultimately willing to facilitate because it helps their bottom line, even when apps are "Free". Although I have certainly taken issue with some devs for being complicit in this situation, and then complaining about it in the face of less scrupulous competitors, Apple gets a very large share of the blame for driving the App Store into the gutter like this. It's tragic, but perhaps because I no longer have any expectation of quality, I just find it hard to get passionate about it anymore. Just checked: 14 apps installed, beyond the stock apps, on my primary device. That's pretty shocking, actually — I used to have at least a hundred. End of days.

> This allows Apple to break backwards compatibility faster.

Right, but Apple already does static analysis on submitted binaries anyway. Why not analyze for API usage, and only notify developers who have in fact been using APIs that are already deprecated. (Or, if you want to be a jerk, APIs that haven't even been deprecated yet but are internally on the chopping block.)

Anyway, yeah, I think that's what this is. Apple has long been rather aggressive about deprecating old APIs, which is a double-edged sword.

> Of course that means companies might want to rely on a third party layer which abstracts away all those shifting sands. Something like Flash... perhaps React? It's ironic that that's what Steve Jobs feared because he thought things like Flash prevented the hardware from being used to its fullest extent, and therefore killed Apple's hardware differentiation.

The reality was this was going to happen no matter what. Upper management hates the idea of having multiple platform-specific apps. Games run on engines like Unity or Unreal, and apps use React Native, Xamarin Forms / MAUI, Flutter.

(Nonetheless, Flash was too monolithic and too poorly adapted for mobile, and it didn't seem like Adobe was particularly able and/or interested in changing that.)

Apple does static analysis.

Indeed they do, and warning about API changes would be a more developer friendly solution. Logically, if you care about developers, that's what you'd do. The fact they aren't, suggests this may be more a business decision: we can change contracts on people more easily this way.

The reality was this was going to happen no matter what.

The fact Apple invested in Swift suggests that when they started they hoped to ward that off. Objective-C is just as good, if not better, for making a runtime for another language as anything else is. So my point is that there is an inherent contradiction in Apple's own behavior here... so either one hand doesn't know what the other is doing, or the strategy changed.

I'm wondering whether Apps have become such a significant source of revenue that the people managing this "business" have taken the fore. They no longer care to attract developers. (There always more where they came from). Instead this is about harvesting maximum revenue, and exploiting a monopoly (re: congress' investigation which concluded they had monopolistic power). I.e. a phase change occurred some time ago, and we're in a different regime from the original one introduced by Steve Jobs.

> The fact Apple invested in Swift suggests that when they started they hoped to ward that off.

In terms of "Objective-C is not only aging, but also very unlike many other languages", sure, but not in terms of "very few companies are interested in making a desktop app plus a web app plus two mobile apps". Instead, they replace the desktop app with an Electron-based web app, if they bother at all, and they replace two mobile apps with just one. Apple and Google and Microsoft can make their respective tooling as attractive as possible to ward that off, but engineers, UX designers, etc. will always fight an uphill battle of "yes, but if we make native apps, they'll be better (in ways hard to explain in an elevator pitch)".

> So my point is that there is an inherent contradiction in Apple's own behavior here

Yes. I wouldn't read too much strategy into this.

This guy, referenced by Gruber, is an idiot who thinks himself clever...

https://mdj.substack.com/p/old-apps-sometimes-die?s=r

Notice that you need to buy a new copy of your Pixar video in 8K format. That's because it took work to upgrade your Pixar video. However, if you want to run the app on the new iPhone, the developer gets exactly nothing for the work to make it work on that new iPhone.

So Apple essentially makes the developer pay to support its incompatibilities.

As a consumer, you got to keep your VHS which still works on your VHS player. It still works with the same electricity network you had when you bought it, and it doesn't contain a battery that keeps no charge. You don't have to replace it every couple of years because of a new and "better" electricity standard. However your old iPhone doesn't work that well on the "new and improved" cellphone network.

MDJ's point(?) would make more sense if we were talking about software that's ten years old, not… two.

Even if Apple provided better tooling to keep your code modern, a lot of people just don't have the budget to keep modernizing their apps every two years. It's needless busywork. And, as has been pointed out, some of Apple's own apps aren't even updated that frequently.