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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

It feels like the whole software ecosystem: operating systems, 1st party app and 3rd party app developers, are all conspiring to keep us on the "buy, buy, buy" treadmill. I've got a perfectly good iPhone 7 and quite a few of the apps are no longer even on the app store, and my existing ones are starting to get "upgrades" that put up full-screen modal dialogs telling me the app no longer works on my phone. They can't even let me keep the old working app installed!

Not to even mention my old O.G. iPad 1 and iPhone 4 which both work as perfectly as the day I bought them, except that none of the software works and the app store is a total ghost town. Software developers are mostly to blame for obsoleting perfectly working hardware.

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> Software developers are mostly to blame for obsoleting perfectly working hardware.

Is it the developer, say, of some app for Android or iOS, at fault, or is it that the changing API surface coupled with App Store policies means that an app developer is forced to keep releasing new versions and deprecating older operating systems and hardware? I always had the impression that Google and Apple took a very dim view of apps that were stable and not refreshed.

It doesn't cost anything or hurt to keep older versions available to download--versions that work on the older OS/API levels.

>It doesn't cost anything or hurt to keep older versions

First, it affects my app ratings in the application store/shop. Some user with 15-year-old device gives me 1-star rating because of some annoying bug that was already fixed 10 years ago but he can not upgrade because that newer version is using a newer API.

Also, what about bugfixes and support? I do not want to have to support (answer emails/calls and deal with bad reviews on all platforms) my ancient version of an app. This would make my app unaffordable for 99% of my users.

That could easily be fixed by preventing people using old versions to give feedback. I guess no app store currently allows that right ?

Yeah this is an important perspective for coming up with a solution, because it’s a very legitimate reason to not want to support old hardware…

> First, it affects my app ratings in the application store/shop

good example of systemic failure - we are destroying a real thing (functionality) to optimise for a fictional thing (rating). There is plenty of old windows software with no support, I have a game that is old enough to drink and it still works and I still sometimes fire it up out of nostalgia.

There is no reason software cannot be like an old motorbike - a 40 year old Honda motorbike can still work, if that’s what the user wants.

> we are destroying a real thing (functionality) to optimise for a fictional thing (rating)

Ratings are quite real. They influence if new people buy your app at all, which influences how viable it is as a business, which influences the app’s future, which influences current customers.

They are constructed reality as opposed to inherent reality. We invented a fake metric then created incentives (adjusting the allocation of real resources) to optimise the fake metric.

It’s not a “fake metric”. It exists, measures something, and it has an effect on the world. It is real. It’s a subpar metric¹, probably even a harmful metric², but that doesn’t make it fake or fictional.

¹ At best it only measures those who rate and it can be gamed (true for every media).

² For the bad incentives you mention.

Semantics/pedantry. I’m sure you’re capable of inferring what the OP means.

> I’m sure you’re capable of inferring what the OP means.

And it’s that I’m disagreeing with. I’m sure you’re capable of understanding that too. Words matter. By being against something and calling it fake or fictional, you’re doing more harm to your cause than by recognising the impact it has on the real world and those who inhabit it.

They're not a fake metric. Sure, ratings can be gamed and are gamed. But ratings and accompanying reviews inherently aren't fake, and are the closest proxy to "word of mouth"

They are artificial. You could have a separate metric for each platform, for older version, you can use different algorithms and to calculate, etc.

What you might be missing in your interpretation is that “fictional,” didn’t mean what you’re saying it does.

The OP meant that the app ratings aren’t a measure of a tangible quality or effect. Like “heat,” or “number of tickets.” The unit of measure and what it means is “fictional,” in the sense that the scale and units are completely made up and arbitrary.

They’re not saying that it’s fictional in the sense that it doesn’t exist or isn’t real.

They’re aptly noting that by forcing developers to optimize for this rating system, app stores are incentivizing developers to support only the most recent OS releases and deprecate support for older devices.

The ratings have real consequences.

Sorry, replying to the wrong comment.

Until you bring the online services side into the picture.

A typical app depends on both OS APIs and remote service APIs.

Keeping the latter stable and supported is harder. Especially when there are third party services and frameworks involved, which there inevitably are.

And whereas no-longer-fixable bugs in an app might be work-aroundable, merely annoying, or outright irrelevant to some use cases, bugs in a service/framework can easily be security stuff that can take down your whole business or land you in regulatory hot water.

> Is it the developer, say, of some app for Android or iOS, at fault, or is it that the changing API surface coupled with App Store policies means that an app developer is forced to keep releasing new versions and deprecating older operating systems and hardware?

"Because of the release of GNOME 2.0 and 2.2, and the lack of interest in maintainership of GNOME 1.4, the gnome-core product is being closed. If you feel your bug is still of relevance to GNOME 2, please reopen it and refile it against a more appropriate component. Thanks..."

"Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?

But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again."

even the FOSS world (:

RHEL 9+ (and as a result, its decedents) is built for x86_64-v2 and has increased RAM requirements for certain installation procedures, so now hundreds/thousands of perfectly functional small servers are no longer able to upgrade (to the next EL version, obviously there are other distributions, but then there's the resource/energy requirement to change everything to something new...) (:

the entirety of computing from top to bottom doesn't give a fuck about the environment. The only way to make this "sustainable" is to slow down and fix/maintain things... but of course that's the antithesis of this world we've built.

One project that I keep coming back to again and again is keeping my circa 2011 netbook functional. It was my main computer for most of grad school, and it seems silly that a perfectly functional bit of hardware (for documents, spreadsheets, etc.) like that doesn't work well.

What I've found is mainstream distros seem to have no respect for aging hardware. Especially if they're desktop-focused. I have had some success with Trisquel[0], netBSD, and FreeDOS. I'm confident I could get Gentoo working if I'm picky about ebuild selection and build everything on a more modern computer, but that does sort of feel like it defeats the purpose. Another option would be maybe to install a version of a mainstream distro from 2011, with the caveat that I'd only be able to install software included on the installation media. Debian Squeeze repos are long gone.

I feel like I shouldn't have to stray so far from the beaten path to do something on a computer from 2011 that I could do comfortably on a Packard Bell in 1992.

[0] On recommendation from an FSF employee. Hardware that can run free software top-to-bottom tends to skew a little older, so Trisquel needs to run well on older hardware.

> The only way to make this "sustainable" is to slow down and fix/maintain things..

The other way is to design the machines, redesign, from the start so at the end they can be dismantled and their resources reused

I have experienced this exact same scenario. I recently started a new job and want to keep my work stuff completely separate and off my personal phone. I fired up my old iPhone 7 and can't even use the Google authenticator app for 2FA to get into my work accounts!

Apps are rarely self-contained you build on layers all the way down to the OS and BIOS/Firmware, I can fire up an old windows or DOS program only because Microsoft still support ancient API's or the BIOS API's still exist on the PC. The older phone processors are still perfectly fine but Apple and Google are not going to support them as they may be slow with new (bloated) code or may not have some fancy feature they use for one tiny part of their latest OS, same with the frameworks that build on top of them and with everything web these days there are a lot of layers.

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