Apple Extends Its Grace Period for Deleting Old (and Unpopular) Apps from Its App Store (9to5mac.com) 33
"As a response to recent coverage of software being purged from the App Store, Apple is sharing its criteria for how it chooses to remove abandoned apps," reports 9to5Mac.
Apple's announcement say it's only flagging apps for possible removal "that
Developers will also have more time to comply after being notified." (90 days instead of 30 days). And 9to5Mac adds that Apple "is also reiterating that the practice is not new but instead part of an initiative that started six years ago.
But the Verge took a different message from "Apple to developers: if we deleted your old app, it deserved it." [T]he company has responded — by issuing a press release effectively saying that nobody was downloading the apps anyways....
Apple's explanation does clear up why it, as some developers noted, seemed to apply the rules inconsistently. For example, one developer noted that Pocket God, a popular game from the iPhone's early days, hasn't been updated for seven years but is still on the App Store. Apple is basically saying it's still up because it's still popular.
From one angle, this reasoning doesn't necessarily gel with the first half of Apple's post, where it says it removes old apps to ensure "user trust in quality apps," and to improve discoverability, security and privacy, and user experience. After all — if an app is problematic because it's outdated, more downloads would make a bad app a bigger issue. Who's being harmed if there's an outdated app almost no one is downloading?
But Apple says it doesn't want the App Store cluttered up with apps that both developers and users have forgotten about. It has enough problems making it easy for users to find good apps as it is, and it's easy to imagine Apple seeing deleting old, seemingly irrelevant apps as a good solution.
Apple's announcement say it's only flagging apps for possible removal "that
Developers will also have more time to comply after being notified." (90 days instead of 30 days). And 9to5Mac adds that Apple "is also reiterating that the practice is not new but instead part of an initiative that started six years ago.
But the Verge took a different message from "Apple to developers: if we deleted your old app, it deserved it." [T]he company has responded — by issuing a press release effectively saying that nobody was downloading the apps anyways....
Apple's explanation does clear up why it, as some developers noted, seemed to apply the rules inconsistently. For example, one developer noted that Pocket God, a popular game from the iPhone's early days, hasn't been updated for seven years but is still on the App Store. Apple is basically saying it's still up because it's still popular.
From one angle, this reasoning doesn't necessarily gel with the first half of Apple's post, where it says it removes old apps to ensure "user trust in quality apps," and to improve discoverability, security and privacy, and user experience. After all — if an app is problematic because it's outdated, more downloads would make a bad app a bigger issue. Who's being harmed if there's an outdated app almost no one is downloading?
But Apple says it doesn't want the App Store cluttered up with apps that both developers and users have forgotten about. It has enough problems making it easy for users to find good apps as it is, and it's easy to imagine Apple seeing deleting old, seemingly irrelevant apps as a good solution.
Solution approach? Where is the money, Lebowski? (Score:2)
Anyone smell a brain fart? [But let me try to insure the vacuous Subject evaporates, too.]
So thinking about solution approaches (as usual), but coming from the Android side I'm hoping someone will explain about how it works in AppleLand (as explained to someone who mostly feels expensively burned by Apple and has no plans to visit again). (I didn't actually have a fire, just lots of battery swelling. My newest toy is a Chromebook, which so far seems pretty useless, but at least they told me almost up front
Not new, clearly posted. (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple is also reiterating that the practice is not new [9to5mac.com] but instead part of an initiative that started six years ago.
Apple went on the note:
The policy has been on display ... at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."
You're apping it wrong. (Score:2, Insightful)
"Apple to developers: if we deleted your old app, it deserved it."
Apple to users: fuck you.
Re: (Score:1)
Apple to users: fuck you.
Apple to users:
Hey, users. You're often sorting through apps in the app store, scrolling down and trying to find the apps you want. We notice that there's a bunch of apps that both are very very old and hence probably outdated in content or security risks, and that nobody downloads. We've decided to remove those, so you don't have to dig through as many apps to find those you want to download.
Users:
That's actually quite reasonable, thanks.
Re: You're apping it wrong. (Score:2)
"Might be a security risk" ::SLAM--LOCK!::
Now there is nothing you can do to convince Apple to keep those old apps because they played the ultimate card that destroys all. Apple wins, as always.
Re: (Score:2)
> Apple to users: fuck you.
Nah, it's the leather and whips of consumer tech.
You'll take it AND you'll like it.
You know what they call it when your business is 100% dependent on the whims of another business? Serfdom.
Yes, you can also leave and start over from scratch.
Re: You're apping it wrong. (Score:2)
This is the oldest trick in the book.
Woo another company into investing a shit ton of money into your product, build their entire infrastructure around it.. ::SLAM--LOCK!::
Now you have them in the palm of your hand and the company will be very unwilling or unable to move to another product.
It's literally called "lock in".
Good policy for users, 90 days fair (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally I think the policy is pretty reasonable. If there are apps developers are not updating, and users are not installing, isn't it reasonable to remove them so they are not cluttering up search results and/or misleading users into downloading an old unsupported app over a newer one.
30 days is a bit short of a warning so I'm glad Apple has extended it to 90, most apps can be re-compiled and have a few issues fixed quite easily and 90 days is a reasonable period for all but the most complex apps (and if it takes longer than that to update them to even work, should they really still be in the store?).
Also remember just because an app is gone from the store does not mean you cannot keep using it on your phone.
This is one of the things Apple does I feel is truly user focused, as it would be very easy to keep apps around forever to encourage companies to just keep paying the developer account fee to keep an app in the store and do no other work.
Re: Good policy for users, 90 days fair (Score:1)
Real reason (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless Apple has reworked their store site pretty significantly in the past couple of years, there's a hard upper limit (imposed by WebObjects) on the number of items in each category that are browsable. If your app falls below the fold, so to speak, nobody will ever accidentally discover it. My guess is that these apps fall below the fold in every subcategory that they are part of. Thus, there's exactly zero chance that anyone will ever download these apps again (not including redownloads) unless they follow a link from some external advertisement or are told about it by someone and search for it by name.
However, if the developers update the app, that moves the app into a "New and Updated" bucket or whatever, so it will suddenly have visibility when sorted by recency of updates. Afterwards, the app might actually get nonzero downloads again.
Apple did do a pretty big store update... (Score:1)
Unless Apple has reworked their store site pretty significantly in the past couple of years, there's a hard upper limit (imposed by WebObjects) on the number of items in each category that are browsable.
Apple did a pretty huge update 2-3 years ago, if that limit still exists I think it would be much higher... and they also have more ways to surface items beyond just user search.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless Apple has reworked their store site pretty significantly in the past couple of years, there's a hard upper limit (imposed by WebObjects) on the number of items in each category that are browsable.
Apple did a pretty huge update 2-3 years ago, if that limit still exists I think it would be much higher... and they also have more ways to surface items beyond just user search.
The limit was an architectural limitation of WebObjects itself, whose codebase I doubt anybody at Apple has done more than trivial maintenance to since 2008 (when they stopped distributing it and the remaining WebObjects engineers moved on to other projects). The impression I got was that the problem wasn't easily fixable, and that raising the limit would require scrapping the entire store codebase and rewriting it from scratch without using WO.
So I'd be very surprised if the limit weren't still there... b
Damned if you do... (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple is in a real 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation here. If the Apple store is flooded by old unsupported apps that barley work (if at all) people will complain. If apple works to weed out the old semi-functional or non-functional apps that no one is downloading people will complain.
So since more people will be complaining about old apps cluttering the store than will complain about apps no one is downloading being removed, it makes sense for apple to do a little Spring Cleaning now and again.
Re: (Score:2)
What's funny is that the publishers of those apps could just change one tiny line of code, recompile, up the version number, and save their app from deletion. Unless Apple is determined to wipe out apps solely on download #.
Re:Damned if you do... (Score:5, Informative)
What's funny is that the publishers of those apps could just change one tiny line of code, recompile, up the version number, and save their app from deletion.
Probably not, actually. There's a reason old apps don't get updated.
Apple, intentionally, doesn't care about backwards compatibility. iOS and the APIs you use change constantly with new releases. Swift doesn't support conditional compilation, which one major exception: it provides what's effectively a preprocessor macro for conditionally building code based on iOS version, since you basically need to write custom code based on which version of iOS your app is running on.
Worse, if you wrote the app in Swift, Swift also constantly changes. Xcode only supports the current and previous version of Swift, and it supports the previous version solely by providing a tool to automatically update it to the current version. If your code is more than a Swift version out of date, you have to update by hand. (Or download old versions of Xcode off dubious parts of the Internet to slowly move it to more modern versions.)
Then there are things like The Notch. Older apps didn't have to worry about it, or the new dead area at the bottom of the screen for "home" gestures and the new grippy thing down there. New ones do. Due to the way iOS apps lay out their UIs, there's a good chance an older app would have to completely redo all the "storyboards" it used to ensure they use proper constraints on new phones.
Rather than go through all that work for older apps, a lot of developers relied on the backwards compatibility shims that Apple provided for existing apps. The problem is that Apple doesn't accept those for submitting updates. Want to submit an update to the App Store? It can't target anything older than iOS 13.
That's why it's not just a simple matter of recompiling. A lot of older iOS apps require a lot of work to get working on modern iPhones. On the other hand, that's also a reason for Apple to block them - they don't work "correctly" on modern iPhones because they haven't been updated to use the current APIs or design considerations.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, that's pretty hostile. It's amazing people put up with that. I guess the RDF is still is working order...
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm. So Apple is doing essentially the same thing as Google: forcing developers to support newer versions of iOS to kill off old hardware. If you can't download apps for your old device on an old iOS version, it becomes that much less useful.
Even if it's an app that used to work on your device.
Re: Damned if you do... (Score:2)
"Apple, intentionally, doesn't care about backwards compatibility. iOS and the APIs you use change constantly with new releases"
Fuck Apple.
So they're free? (Score:1)
Asking for a friend.
Shame on AAPL promoting “Chur n” (Score:2)
Great apps that excel, written by developers who understood computer science, design, architecture, abstractions, UX and used Apple’s Obj-C libraries are now fucked!
Videon, for example, hasn’t been updated since iPhone 4s, works seamlessly on iPad3 and flawless does better video than anything Apple has been able to produce. That’s the mark of an excellent app that will not crash, brittle break or obsolete optimizations over time.
Apple has to kill it in the end. I keep using my iPhone 4s fo
Re: Shame on AAPL promoting “Chur n” (Score:2)
So developers will have to "update" (as in doing as little as changing a font or moving a button slightly to the left) just so they won't get the axe from Apple.
This is a good reason to avoid platforms where one company dictates all. And of course, the goal posts are always on the move.
"Unpopular apps" (Score:2)
A calculator designed for a specific engineering problem isn't going to be as popular as Candy Crush, because there aren't as many engineers as the (insert fitting insult here) masses.
So it's not going to be "popular" but that does not mean people don't download it or that they don't need it.
Anyway, it's a moot point as talking to Apple is less productive than talking to a brick wall, and it's up to the user to switch to a platform where one company does not dictate everything.
Re: (Score:2)
it's up to the user to switch to a platform where one company does not dictate everything.
Which handheld platform might that be? The only other handheld computing platforms that are household names in the West are Android with Google Play and Nintendo Switch Lite, and Nintendo is reportedly even more tightly controlling than Apple.
Re: "Unpopular apps" (Score:2)
"Android with Google Play "
Apps can be sideloaded by downloading the .APK and making sure you have "Install from unknown sources" enabled. It's been this way from the very beginning.
You can even get Android phones with almost all of the Google stuff removed.
Re: "Unpopular apps" (Score:2)
There are even alternate app stores for Android if you really need an app store.
Allow sideloading and this is a non-issue (Score:1)
But that would be if people had other means to install that 3MB application that did something very simple and although it was never updated it still serves it purpose.
Wouldn't be a problem with side-loading (Score:2)
I get the issue Apple is trying to resolve. And when viewing the App Store as an Apple-supported marketplace, it makes perfect sense. The issue is that the App Store is more than that. It's the ONLY way to get a third party app onto your phone.
There are absolutely use cases for using an old and unsupported app. For example, I have a bluetooth remote control car that sits on my shelf. It's controlled by an ancient app. At some point this app will get pulled from the app store and that remote control car will