Apple is removing a few of my old games b/c they have “not been updated […]” | Hacker News Reader

Apple is removing a few of my old games b/c they have “not been updated […]”

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59 pointstosh17 comments

I suspect that part of the reason for this is some larger companies not updating their apps to avoid complying with the App Store privacy Nutrition Labels. Even Google stopped updating all of their iOS apps for a long time because they didn't want to deal with the fallout from disclosing how much data they collect. Smaller developers are probably being affected unintentionally, unless they are also collecting data they don't want to disclose.

https://www.inputmag.com/culture/is-google-not-updating-its-...

What was the exact consequence of the projects not having been updated? Are they actually supported in the current set of macOS/iOS versions? Apple is renowned for being very proactive in pushing Xcode updates, and with it pushing platform updates.

I’d expect it would be sufficient to just recompile the app with the latest dev tools and push it as a “performance and bug fix” update. It does make sense that apple wants to prune old things from the App Store but it’s also unfortunate the author can’t provide a direct download from their website as an alternative.

Google is doing the same by pushing their minimum android API requirement. I had to use one of those APK hosting sites to get the app for some wireless speakers i bought because google kicked them off the Play store. Of course you can't do this on Apple devices because they are locked harder than North Korea

You sort of can but it’s silly and inconvenient. You are allowed to sideload any app you signed with your own apple account for 7 days. So someone made a tool you install on your own server that will resign the sideloaded apps you want and automatically keep them available on your device.

related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31135972

Perhaps some vulnerabilities arrived into the product via old Xcode toolchains? Yeah, struggling to play Devil's advocate here.

Apple does not like old.

Yes this is good actually. We don't want to end up like Windows.

> we

Are you Apple? Or do you identify yourself as being part of the Apple family?

Some of my work is iOS development, and I am an Apple user as well.

Old apps, if they no longer work, should die.

I have to disagree.

I try to be lean at work and see things holistically.

This does mean that a piece of software is a living thing and needs to be maintained.

Apple is not the company which needs to preserve history.

So I'm not following nthe critisms.i even think often enough if we all would agree to create and share less but better,.we would not distract ourselves with our own content.

Like imagine no one would post anything on a Thursday. What a stressless day that would be.

Yeah Apple’s approach to backwards compatibility is basically the opposite of Microsoft’s: treat software as a living thing that will need ongoing maintenance and upkeep; push developers forwards and push them towards this understanding; let them know apple will not put in Herculean effort to effort to keeping decades old software running.

This, of course, has huge drawbacks, but also huge benefits (e.g. developers adopt new APIs much faster which benefits the end user faster).

I do empathize with wanting old software and old hobby projects to just keep working (especially when Apple likes to advertise their products as “It just works.”) We all just want tog ER in with our lives.

One of the author’s tweets mentions further down that at least one of the games was written in Swift 1.0 or so and they never updated and recompile with later swift versions. That’s on them.

> (e.g. developers adopt new APIs much faster which benefits the end user faster).

There is less than zero evidence this is true, if anything, it's the explanation for why devices in general get slower as time goes on even if someone doesn't download any new apps but does download regular updates.

>(e.g. developers adopt new APIs much faster which benefits the end user faster).

On the other hand, you have most iOS apps with a high iOS minimum requirement. The moment your device stops getting updates, you need a new one as your apps will, for the most part, cease getting updates.

On Android's end, as long as your device is on Lollipop and up, you shouldn't have issues. Android devs adopting new APIs.. Well, devs aren't as well behaved on this end (lol scoped storage) though Google's mandates recently have been pushing some things forward with its own demerits, it's wait and see.

>One of the author’s tweets mentions further down that at least one of the games was written in Swift 1.0 or so and they never updated and recompile with later swift versions. That’s on them.

You have no idea how much work and time it takes to migrate an app between Swift versions prior to 5.0

I do actually. That’s why you don’t wait years until the last minute to do it. Also the breaking syntax changes between version really slowed down after the first few versions. Also also I would say it was unwise to build upon the first version of anything and expect it to work forever, especially when Apple was saying it was the first version and there will be changes.

There's still a lot of entropy involved in forcing a new update, such as laptops possibly not supporting the new minimum macOS for Xcode, various frameworks which may have been deprecated, etc.

And when it comes to games? The game engines are big issues, which is why most games are just made and left to gather dust, because updating them can be a real herculean effort.

And asking people to take the effort without stating a reason? That's pretty harsh. At the very least make a public statement about it, and make it apply to everyone, so everyone's aware of what their time/money investment will amount to when making an app.

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