Hacker News Reader

Comment by spronkey | Hacker News Reader

Amen.

I also see this somewhat as a 'own your st' scenario. Apple makes all of these systems and platforms, and then proceeds to abandon them, producing waste (in both materials and developer time for the apps that get updated for nothing but compatibility reasons).

They update their APIs, deprecate the old stuff, at a breakneck pace, and they leave a great mess behind. They should be forced to think more about the mess they are making, and be unable to leave it without penalties. One way for them to not leave it would be to open it up. Another way would be to support older versions for a longer timeframe, and allow users to continue to download and use them.

Either way, it's not in Apple's interests to do this - they're much more content to force this crap down our throats, and rely on us just dealing with it because there really isn't any choice.

View on HN

The mess they are leaving behind are outdated, crappy apps. They don't adapt to modern screen sizes, use memory efficiently, download efficiently (bitcode), etc.

Apple is continuously improving and modernizing it's platform. They should be banning hundreds of thousands of zombie apps that haven't been touched in many years because they are not valuable and misleading to customers. But they don't, they allow you to keep your apps available on the store no matter how old or how poorly written. Finally they have their first platform change that's going to break them, and they can automatically boot them. That's a very good thing.

And among the hundreds of thousands of older apps are apps built by smaller teams to supplement other things i.e. web services that struggle to keep everything maintained.

It's far more important that the apps remain usable to their end users than it is that they adapt perfectly to a slightly larger screen size :s

Apple's development platform moves too quickly for many developers to keep pace with. It's not that all these apps are not valuable or misleading to customers.

For another example, a thread today brought up Winamp. Winamp's last major updates happened, quite literally, a decade ago.

This is a player that works just fine on Windows 10, and there's definitely a case to be made that it's better [overall] than any more modern alternative.

This type of software can never happen on iOS, and is quickly becoming a relic on Mac OS.

The core principles of good software haven't changed much over the years. UI (in HCI terms) has in many ways not moved forward much at all. Apple are changing their platform it seems, more for the sake of change, than for the sake of real progress. And they're forcing some really good software out because of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com