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Comment by bredren | Hacker News Reader

The author mentions code signing as a tricky ecosystem thing. Well, wait until the app has to get new assets to be resubmitted with bug fixes for new versions of iOS.

And if they don’t keep updating it, it will stop working and the buy it for life idea commits the dev to maintenance that isn’t paid for either upfront or through subscription.

There are folks who make and give away a lot but some learn their lesson quickly and find ways to get people to put a reasonable amount of recurring payment into the app to make it even remotely sustainable beyond a hobby.

FWIW, AI may make this cost so much lower that this kind of thing can make sense now. Something to consider, I suppose.

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I think a lot of what Apple has added to their App Store in the name of security is really just to get developers to move to recurring revenue models, which in turns makes Apple a lot more money. An old app that hasn't been updated in a couple years isn't inherently dangerous, but if Apple can convince users that it is, then devs will have to rethink how they do business. It's a shame to watch Google copy this move too on the Play Store.

There are changes that can be valuable to users. Like the privacy attestations. I was not publishing at that time but I presume that was part of the mandatory dev march.

Apps will work if you don’t update it I have apps that are 10 years old not updated and still work

Some last, some don’t. I think it may depend on how the app is implemented and what it depends on.

They now have a new App Store rule that states if you don’t update your apps for 3 years , it’s out unless there is a “substantial” download numbers.

Or just developing in Apple's crappy ecosystem.

eg Apple publishes a new ios rev; debugging on it requires upgrading xcode; and that requires updating your OS.. Good thing you don't mind wasting a full day or more reinstalling every other devtool you may happen to use. Or xcode just doesn't connect to your ios device because reasons. (The reason is apple writes shoddy slapdash software because monopoly.)

So now you're spending another $1500+ on a studio so you can do all this in VMs and see how bad the damage will be to avoid blowing up your main devbox. etc etc.

This sounds like Python development....and React.....and Svelte....and oh, remember Angular 2 to 3? Or people who invest time in Clojure? Were you a fan of the MEAN stack a decade ago? Build something on it? How's that app doing?

What you're describing is not unique to Apple. It's a regular occurrence for anyone who's not writing for a enterprise SAAS company with a largely legacy codebase and a dozen DevOps guys mostly obscuring that stuff from you.

well atleast those react,angular apps still works

ios app on apple store??? not so much

> This sounds like Python development....and React.....and Svelte....and oh, remember Angular 2 to 3?

I can open a webpage written in Angular 1, or written in year 1990. I can run a program written for windows 95 on my new PC with windows 11. It’s normal to keep compatibility for compiled/finished ebd user software.

but, can you run npm install on your angular 1 codebase from 1990? or was it bower install ? remember grunt?

my 2012 mac hardware works perfectly fine, even the battery is OG, apple stopped supporting it, chrome won't give update on the last supported os.

software is fragile.

i constrain myself to html and plain vanilla js. if i have to use deps, they are local or hosted .js lib files, minified. d3 is a great example of this pattern.

I miss gulp, things seemed so much simpler back then in retrospect and the nature of JavaScript fatigue seemed to be the FOMO kind instead of this abstraction over abstraction that abstracts that other abstraction but you still have to the understand what it abstracted away kind we have going on today.

Will TypeScript go the way of CoffeeScript in the future? Who knows.

Yeah companies who care about this stuff use more mature ecosystems that don’t break api every year.

Wait what? Isn't App Store and Play Store mature ecosystems yet?!

I can easily do those on my Late 2013 MBP running Catalina, but not iOS development for the App Store, because it has a minimum Xcode version requirement, which in turn requires a newer OS, which requires buying a new Mac.

Nonsense. Upgrading python using standard tools does not regularly require OS upgrades. asdf, rbenv or various other tools will happily pull in new releases from their ecosystems.

Go requires macos from 2016 or kernel 3.2 which I think is over a decade old. I can't find any limit for jvm 25, though I'm sure there is one. No competently-built tool requires OS upgrades like xcode.

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