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
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.
On the other side the grass has the same colour.
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.
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 [2]: https://github.com/jnordberg/triggy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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
LowStakesConspiracy: Apple needs to keep developers buying newer Macbooks / iPhones.
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.
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.
As with so many Apple policies this is perfectly understandable but becomes unacceptable because they monopolize access to applications on their platform.
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.
There is one thing worse than government regulation: having your market regulated by a company.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
only a user having the choice to sideload or not can solve the issues of the AppStore.
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.
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
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.
Similar current Twitter thread on the same issue:
https://twitter.com/lazerwalker/status/1517849201148932096?s...
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.
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.
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…
Stop tending other peoples' gardens. Especially trillion dollar companies' ones. No sympathy here, we all know the drill by now.
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?
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.
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.
We need independent appstores where developers can distribute their work as they see fit.
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.
> 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.
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.
It’s fine. I mean Apple refunds you if the App you bought gets removed, right?
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?
Maybe a change in IP legals that can force corporations to open source deprecated platforms can help preserving these cultural artefacts.
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.
Looks like Apple is exposing nasty bugs in Unity's failures to maintain compatibility with old source code.
Is there any effort going into iOS game preservation? Or current mobile games are just not worth it?
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.
by analogy, youtube should pull all the videos that are not at least 1080p
live by the store, die by the store
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/id471966...
Rules for thee, but not for me!
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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.