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.
It feels like we are back in time before writing existed. I wonder if in 10,000 years from now archeologists will find any real cultural artifact from our time.
How closely does Apple monitor for changes? Could you simply update the copyright text each year and push an "update" to remain on the store. I can't imagine they have people looking at each app for new levels or features.
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.
Can you just add a Marshawn Lynch-style "I'm just here so I don't get fined" line of text to the app's "about" page and call it a day? Or are you gonna have to make major changes to update to the latest versions of iOS?
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.
If you say something like “apps that are recently updated and using all of the latest APIs should be ranked higher within Apple’s search algorithm and recommendations”, that would make quite a bit of sense to me as an incentive to keep development and progress moving forward with all of the updated tech.
But it makes no sense to force devs to expend the effort to recompile and update an App just for the sake of staying on a store if everything is already working perfectly as intended with no security issues. This is especially a crap deal for small developers without endless resources to continuously be working on rebuilding and retooling projects just for the sake of Apple’s inability to do search and discovery well.
> The market right now is absolutely flooded with indie games, some light pruning is probably for the best.
By arbitrarily removing perfectly working older games? This is why indie devs such as Vlambeer that used to make quality mobile games now avoid ios and android like the plague.
The result of this is mobile games require significantly more upkeep then games on PC or consoles, and as a result the only games that are profitable in the long run are those that exploit their users with f2p microtransactions.
The end result of this is the sea of uninspired exploitative trash that makes up the games market on ios and android.
Games in particular usually don't use a lot of system UIs or other integrations (and so are less likely to break or visibly age), are often developed on a shoestring budget (so developers will have less time and resources to keep updating them over time), and have artistic value.
Kicking them off the only store on a closed platform is erasure of artistic history. It's doubly insulting when they still work perfectly without modification.
For comparison: I've never heard of a game getting kicked off of a console's store because of a "lack of updates". The stores themselves usually shut down eventually - which is its own problem - but at least there's a reasonable business argument for why the company can't be expected to offer that service indefinitely.
As a dev myself, I agree. You can’t really expect to just toss a binary over the wall and forget about the project for the next decade.
Software is an ongoing commitment and periodic recompiles and fixes should factor into architecture and planning. Some decisions early on can save you a lot of pain. For instance, building your app with stock UI widgets to the greatest extent possible and limiting custom widgets and third party stuff to a minimum goes a LONG way for making your apps weather new OS versions better. These days my UIKit apps only need a handful of minor changes when a new OS version is released, making them trivial to maintain.
Choosing Unity was a big part of the problem in this case because Unity is terrible about maintaining particular versions of their engines over time. Devs need to start dumping Unity over this, because it’s the only way that Unity is ever going to fix it.
What is "abandonware"? Software does not have an expiration date. If it runs, if it does everything it does originally, I don't see the point for "patching support" for the sake of it.
If they actually gave any indication of what exactly they think needs to be updated other than the age of the app I would tend to agree but if an app is considered complete and running fine on current devices then it’s not abandonware.
If people are still downloading and using an app, that should be reason enough to keep it. I would understand removing apps that virtually no one has downloaded, and also actually used, in the past two years. This may conceivably have even been the case here, but then Apple should communicate exactly that.
Why should I lose access to an app I’ve potentially paid for and enjoy just because someone else don’t have time to do a specific dance dictated by Apple?
iOS and Android usually have perfect backwards compatibility, so there's no technical reason to require a new build. The apps work perfectly fine on new devices automatically.
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.
At this point, I see no other option other than lobbying your congressmembers to regulate SV companies finally. Now companies are enforcing the uptake of new APIs for no real purpose? Half of the churn is just to pad googler pedigree and advance within the company, it is a shame they are enforcing that culture on their users.
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...
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.
^ 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
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.
Yeah, HTML5 is incredible in that way. How much effort would it be for you to convert your iOS games to HTML5?
Very curious as we’re building a mobile-focused platform for HTML5 games that make it easy to make your game social. I’d love to help save some of these great iOS games being removed.
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.
[+] [-] DaveSapien|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Aeolun|4 years ago|reply
Guess this ‘remove all the great apps that don’t need to be updated’ strategy is going to backfire.
[+] [-] zouhair|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macinjosh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlchemistCamp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] septillianator|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bfelbo|3 years ago|reply
Then they can never be removed.
Very curious as we’re building an iOS/Android platform for HTML5 games. Would love to help save some of these great iOS games being removed by Apple.
[+] [-] keleftheriou|4 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, games like Pocket God have not been updated for 7 years now: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pocket-god/id301387274
[+] [-] ceejayoz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altairprime|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianlevesque|4 years ago|reply
The market right now is absolutely flooded with indie games, some light pruning is probably for the best.
[+] [-] logicalmonster|4 years ago|reply
If you say something like “apps that are recently updated and using all of the latest APIs should be ranked higher within Apple’s search algorithm and recommendations”, that would make quite a bit of sense to me as an incentive to keep development and progress moving forward with all of the updated tech.
But it makes no sense to force devs to expend the effort to recompile and update an App just for the sake of staying on a store if everything is already working perfectly as intended with no security issues. This is especially a crap deal for small developers without endless resources to continuously be working on rebuilding and retooling projects just for the sake of Apple’s inability to do search and discovery well.
[+] [-] Hammershaft|4 years ago|reply
By arbitrarily removing perfectly working older games? This is why indie devs such as Vlambeer that used to make quality mobile games now avoid ios and android like the plague.
https://variety.com/2019/gaming/features/android-ios-apple-g...
The result of this is mobile games require significantly more upkeep then games on PC or consoles, and as a result the only games that are profitable in the long run are those that exploit their users with f2p microtransactions.
The end result of this is the sea of uninspired exploitative trash that makes up the games market on ios and android.
[+] [-] brundolf|4 years ago|reply
Kicking them off the only store on a closed platform is erasure of artistic history. It's doubly insulting when they still work perfectly without modification.
For comparison: I've never heard of a game getting kicked off of a console's store because of a "lack of updates". The stores themselves usually shut down eventually - which is its own problem - but at least there's a reasonable business argument for why the company can't be expected to offer that service indefinitely.
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|4 years ago|reply
Software is an ongoing commitment and periodic recompiles and fixes should factor into architecture and planning. Some decisions early on can save you a lot of pain. For instance, building your app with stock UI widgets to the greatest extent possible and limiting custom widgets and third party stuff to a minimum goes a LONG way for making your apps weather new OS versions better. These days my UIKit apps only need a handful of minor changes when a new OS version is released, making them trivial to maintain.
Choosing Unity was a big part of the problem in this case because Unity is terrible about maintaining particular versions of their engines over time. Devs need to start dumping Unity over this, because it’s the only way that Unity is ever going to fix it.
[+] [-] com2kid|4 years ago|reply
No one opened your app in 2 years? It gets the boot.
If an app is still actively being used, removing it hurts developers and users!
I have apps on my Android phone that haven't been updated in years. They work just fine.
Heck on my MacBook I use an app that wad last updated in 2016 or so, and I consider it a vital pri0 part of my daily workflow!
[+] [-] freeone3000|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcheong|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] layer8|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seba_dos1|4 years ago|reply
As if that was the concern there at all. Most people who publish free games consider them "art", not "business model".
[+] [-] Asooka|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poisonborz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Siira|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hackbraten|4 years ago|reply
That would make ongoing maintenance more expensive for games than for other apps. Maybe Apple should honor that and allow more slack for games.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gameswithgo|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Aulig|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tams80|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grishka|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noobermin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grumpyprole|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] almostdigital|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] userbinator|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kerng|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thewebcount|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbd|4 years ago|reply
Checked, was last updated in 2018: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/super-hexagon/id549027629
[+] [-] awinter-py|4 years ago|reply
^ 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
[+] [-] TheJoeMan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyuszika7h|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m34|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Jyaif|3 years ago|reply
That's not the case anymore, but yes during the first ten years of iOS you had to recompile and resubmit your app to support new screen resolutions.
That was incredibly dumb. Even Android did not do this mistake.
[+] [-] aeturnum|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mysterydip|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bfelbo|3 years ago|reply
Very curious as we’re building a mobile-focused platform for HTML5 games that make it easy to make your game social. I’d love to help save some of these great iOS games being removed.
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bricemo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w0mbat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vimy|4 years ago|reply
I can’t wait until Apple is forced to add third party stores.