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Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

How about using the carrot and not the stick?

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.

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A lot of the comments here are focusing on indie developers, but honestly the worst offenders are huge companies that aren't focused on software, like HVAC, IoT, automotive. They'll hire out a subcontractor once to throw an app over the fence and let it rot. There's no market pressure up front when you are buying a washing machine to evaluate the support model for the companion apps, so this isn't a problem that solves itself. Apple has now forced these companies to maintain their stuff, and the market will be better off for it.

And then you have the other side, where the company doesn't upgrade the app (either cost savings or the company went under) and now you have an expensive brick because the app is suddenly gone from the store.

Oh, but they’ll allow you to keep already installed apps, so the only thing you need to do when you get a new phone is figure out which of your 100 apps have been unpublished in the meantime.

And then, I dunno, decide you are not going to upgrade because you don’t want devices in your house to be expensive bricks.

You can actually reinstall unlisted apps on a new phone They're available in the past purchase section. Not to defend Apple (especially since it's so hidden that very few users find it) but at least there's that.

Not necessarily. I bought a very expensive cat toy robot that had a companion app. The company that made it didn’t just hide the app, they delisted it entirely. When I upgraded to a new phone, the download links were dead. It started me down a journey of coding my own replacement and reverse engineering the device’s firmware and BLE protocols which was a fun and rewarding experience. But, the fact that this was even necessary really stunk.

> Apple has now forced these companies to maintain their stuff

No it hasn't. They can rebuild without improving anything.

If they do Apple can just reject the update. For better or worse this also amounts to a re-review every couple years.

I somehow can't believe Apple cares that much about either group, regardless of who in some manufactured statistical methodology you feel is the "worst offender." This has more to do with control than anything else, because I am unable to imagine a better fitting explanation. May be the "why" isn't really what you were addressing with your comment, but if it was, this can't be a "why."

No kidding. I still kick myself for a few things I bought with these types of apps (they become unusable). Ugh, you really need to buy from major vendors. Ie, a dash cam with a partial app from 6 years ago never update, lots of bugs. IoT is horrible as well. HVAC I got luckyish so far by going with Samsung (app works OK in my view).

How is that Apple's problem, you should read the reviews about the company's products and see what people are saying about the apps.

> 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.

Sure, but realistically how does Apple tell perfectly fine apps apart from apps that are abandoned and do have security issues?

Hand-auditing every app doesn't seem realistic. I doubt a good automated solution is either.

They could just take developers' word for it, but Apple has a responsibility to protect end users. If you tell a developer, "your answer to our next question determines whether we remove your app", then you can't count on them to answer honestly because you gave them an enormous incentive to lie.

> Sure, but realistically how does Apple tell perfectly fine apps apart from apps that are abandoned and do have security issues?

Not to mention, the more apps with an inch-thick layer of dust there are on the App Store, the more they become trapped in the same kind of backwards compatibility mire that Microsoft is now stuck in. They could just hide apps that don’t run on newer versions of iOS I suppose, but with the extremely high system upgrade rate of iOS users that’s practically the same as removing them from the store.

I don't know, how does Apple tell perfectly fine new apps, that don't even have a track record of satisfied users (with telemetry that Apple has), from new apps that don't work?

How is the age of the app relevant?

Compilers and other development tools link framework code, libraries, and runtimes into binaries. Security issues get discovered, development tools get updated, binaries don't, binaries lack security fixes.

Old binaries are also built against old versions of the SDK and as a result get left behind when the OS adds or changes interactions, and if new device sizes are introduced they have to run in a blurry scaled compatability mode.

This is a design flaw from Apple, not an inherent fact about software. On PC most older games scale fine to modern resolutions.

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