alt Hacker News> Apple's contempt for backward compatibility
This is absolutely correct. Instead of maintaining any sort of ABI and API stability, Apple offloads a constant burden of maintenance updates across thousands of developers, just to keep existing apps from breaking every year with a new iOS version. This takes time which could be spent in more productive ways such as fixing bugs, adding features, or developing new apps. It seems like the wrong trade-off, since stability would offer huge, multiplicative benefits across the whole ecosystem. Apple does seem to want apps to die to mitigate the glut of shovelware in the app store, but there has to be a better way (human curation still seems like the only reliable approach for app surfacing and discovery.)
Most iOS apps are games, but in contrast to developing for other game platforms, iOS developers have to continuously update each game yearly simply to keep it working. (Not to mention Apple was happy to kill off 32-bit games on both iOS and macOS, and many games were never converted to 64-bit.) Compare to other handheld game platforms such as the Nintendo DS/DSi/3DS where games mostly kept working across major and minor hardware revisions along with dozens of firmware revisions from 2004-2020, or the Switch where games have generally worked from across Switch 1 and 2 from 2017 onward.
Replies
Maybe it’s worse for games, but I’ve been maintaining non-game apps on both iOS and Android for many years and keeping the iOS halves functional has generally been pretty chill. Updates aren’t required all that often and it’s rare that APIs break entirely on me, especially if targeting older SDKs. Usually the worst post-WWDC fallout is needing to recompile the app in question with minimal changes.
By comparison, Android is much worse. The Play Store kicks you off for not submitting updates much more quickly and the whole ecosystem is in a permanent state of simultaneous flux and obsolescence. Whatever deity help you if you let an Android project collect dust for a year or two… you’re gonna be fighting battles on multiple fronts getting everything up to date. Gradle conflicts, APIs getting deprecated without fully baked replacements, divergence in behavior between OS versions… it’s a real hoot.
> iOS developers have to continuously update each game yearly simply to keep it working
This is usually not the case
well it also made macOS the nicer platform with modern, well maintained apps for the past 2 decades.
Contempt. use any apple device 2 updates back or more. you're screwed.
You would accept this in no other place in life, except that apple gives it for free, and puts a 'security' sticker on the box.
It's a racket. Planned obsolescence 2.0 - Users forced to update, update removes features, breaks working apps, breaks paid for ip ( literally removed from phones), apple blames the devs. bullshit.
> This is absolutely correct. Instead of maintaining any sort of ABI and API stability, Apple offloads a constant burden of maintenance updates across thousands of developers, just to keep existing apps from breaking every year with a new iOS version. This takes time which could be spent in more productive ways such as fixing bugs, adding features, or developing new apps. It seems like the wrong trade-off, since stability would offer huge, multiplicative benefits across the whole ecosystem. Apple does seem to want apps to die to mitigate the glut of shovelware in the app store, but there has to be a better way (human curation still seems like the only reliable approach for app surfacing and discovery.)
I keep trying to explain this to people but it's hard enough to describe the issue, even harder to get people to care, and an impossible battle to change Apple. I don't actually think they're doing this to kill old apps. I think it's a very cynical and calculated plan to require developers to actively maintain their applications, *thereby requiring the use of subscriptions as the only viable business model for developers.* That is Apple's primary revenue stream by far, and they're making far more money now that we have to subscribe to workout apps instead of buying them once and using them for years.