{"id":11105,"date":"2015-04-29T11:08:48","date_gmt":"2015-04-29T15:08:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=11105"},"modified":"2015-04-29T11:11:25","modified_gmt":"2015-04-29T15:11:25","slug":"removing-unmaintained-apps-from-the-app-store","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/29\/removing-unmaintained-apps-from-the-app-store\/","title":{"rendered":"Removing Unmaintained Apps from the App Store"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/outside-xcode.com\/2015\/04\/19\/removing-unmaintained-apps-from-the-app-store\/\">Gavin Hope<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/outside-xcode.com\/2015\/04\/19\/removing-unmaintained-apps-from-the-app-store\/\">\n<p>Here&rsquo;s why I don&rsquo;t want an unmaintained app in the App Store:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It goes again my values. I value good software and I try to make good software. Leaving apps around that I have no intention of improving feels wrong.<\/li>\n<li>It&rsquo;s not good for the customer. Allowing someone to invest time and\/or money into software that&rsquo;s been written off seems unfair; I like the software that I use to be kept up to date, bugs fixed and improvements made.<\/li>\n<li>It looks bad. Out of date apps don&rsquo;t reflect well on the other things I&rsquo;m developing. They can suggest poor decisions, habits and practices. They make the overall portfolio look disjointed and messy.<\/li>\n<\/ul><\/blockquote>\n<p>I recently discovered that Gameloft&rsquo;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gameloft.com\/mobile-games\/the-oregon-trail\/\">The Oregon Trail<\/a> (<a href=\"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/app\/ios\/oregon-trail\">App Store<\/a>) has been abandoned. I purchased it when it was released for $6. 65,652 ratings later, it&rsquo;s still for sale at $5 with this too-subtle disclaimer in the description:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/app\/ios\/oregon-trail\"><p>We are aware of an issue that might prevent the game from running properly on iOS 7 or iOS 8. We apologize for any current inconvenience this may cause.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It turns out that it doesn&rsquo;t launch at all on iOS 8 or even iOS 7. So it&rsquo;s been broken for a long time. It&rsquo;s apparently abandoned because the last update was in 2011. When I reported the problem to Gameloft, they said:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Unfortunately, The Oregon Trail has not been optimized for new Apple devices, that is why you may experience problems of this kind.<\/p>\n<p>We suggest the following solution:<\/p>\n<ul><li>delete The Oregon Trail<\/li>\n<li>install The Oregon Trail: American Settler Free+<\/li><\/ul><\/blockquote>\n<p>The &ldquo;solution&rdquo; is to install a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gameloft.com\/iphone-games\/the-oregon-trail-american-settler-free\/\">completely different game<\/a> (<a href=\"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/app\/ios\/oregon-trail-american-settler\">App Store<\/a>). Or, I guess, you could play the free <a href=\"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/13\/old-ms-dos-games\/\">JavaScript version<\/a>, although that doesn&rsquo;t work on my iPhone.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gavin Hope: Here&rsquo;s why I don&rsquo;t want an unmaintained app in the App Store: It goes again my values. I value good software and I try to make good software. Leaving apps around that I have no intention of improving feels wrong. It&rsquo;s not good for the customer. Allowing someone to invest time and\/or money [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[91,418,31,469,904,26,1184],"class_list":["post-11105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-appstore","tag-game","tag-ios","tag-ios7","tag-ios-8","tag-iosapp","tag-the-oregon-trail"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11105"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11106,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11105\/revisions\/11106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}