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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

You're right that a policy like this favors newcomers. Buy why is being "old" and/or "done" seen as bad in software? We need more developers to embrace "done" and stop changing software for the sake of changing it. Most of the software I use, I like just the way it is. I don't want more features. I don't want the UI to change (again). I don't want AI and chat in them. I don't want to have to upgrade my operating system just to keep using them.

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It's not about newcomers. You merely need to update the API level which is something you can do in a few hours. It's mostly an update of the app version, retrieve the SDK for the API level, recompile and go through the motions in the Play Store.

You don't need to add features if you don't want to.

they aren't asking to make changes. It is android is constantly evolving so basically their 'hope' is every app developer will rebuild with latest android and test on a modern device and proactively fix or remove an app if it doesn't. Plenty of apps crash on startup and not a great user experience to be the consumer that finds the crash so pushing it back to dev to do this yearly is a reasonable expectation.

I don't think it's reasonable to change an OS in such a way that apps which did not previously crash on startup now crash on startup. Unless there is some huge change, like moving from one CPU architecture to another, apps should not even have to be rebuilt, let alone modified, just to keep working year after year.

>Unless there is some huge change, like moving from one CPU architecture to another, apps should not even have to be rebuilt, let alone modified, just to keep working year after year.

And, as history teaches us[0], not necessarily even then.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-code_machine

Java - write once run anywhere*

*: Conditions may apply.

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