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This has happened to me also (indie game dev) a few years ago. The number is about 20 or so games that have been removed by Apple because they hadn't been upda

This has happened to me also (indie game dev) a few years ago. The number is about 20 or so games that have been removed by Apple because they hadn't been updated in two years. The worked perfectly fine on all the new hardware/software and even work today. On top of that, I know that there is another 30 or so apps I was involved in with clients that have also been removed. These weren't the biggest apps/games in the world, but they were all high quality finished products that had nothing wrong with them. Its just the cost of re-publishing each one out-weighed the return, so I didn't have much of a choice sadly. I do have plans to re-publish some of them, however they have to take a back seat for current work. All that to say, I have a large part of my portfolio of work that is no longer available to the public, which just sucks.

bfelbo 4y ago
How much effort would it be for you to convert your iOS games to HTML5? Then they can never be removed. Very curious as we’re building an iOS/Android platform for HTML5 games. Would love to help save some of these great iOS games being removed by Apple.
- DaveSapien 4y ago
  Total remakes from basically scratch. I've settled on rolling with c++ with no(minimal) external dependancies as the best solution...still using Unity for some projects, its just so fast to get stuff done!
macinjosh 4y ago
How closely does Apple monitor for changes? Could you simply update the copyright text each year and push an "update" to remain on the store. I can't imagine they have people looking at each app for new levels or features.
- meibo 4y ago
  You need to recompile/submit with the newest xcode, which is not feasible for games as that would mean having to upgrade the engine.
  - DaveSapien 4y ago
    You are spot on, but that might even be the best case scenario. Thing can quickly turn south and cost quite a bit of time.
AlchemistCamp 4y ago
What does it cost to republish them?
- ronyeh 4y ago
  Time. For a solo / indie shop, you have limited time. Every time macOS/Xcode/iOS updates, some of the iOS APIs are deprecated in favor of "the new better way of doing things". You have to keep up, or else your old apps stop compiling at some point.
- jws 4y ago
  Best case, check out your code, bump the version number, touch up your copyright date, hit "Run", do your testing¹, hit upload, have a sandwich, check it out in TestFlight, approve a release, maybe check a few boxes that say you aren't shipping super secret encryption technology to shunned nations.² But usually after a few years Xcode will bitch at you about a lot of stuff, so maybe you raise the minimum OS version requirement, click "Fix it" on a lot of API respellings, find a couple that it can't automatically fix so you have to google that a bit. Then test and upload. Maybe get in a fight with Xcode over your signing keys. Sometimes something you were using gets deprecated and you have to use the newer replacement. That takes some coding. It can get ugly if the 'owner' in the app store is not you or is an entity you no longer control. Then you have to get them involved to do the chain of trust signing. If you produced it under contract, you may not be legally allowed to update it without a new contract. ␃ ¹ do your testing is easy to say, but that could take an arbitrarily long time depending on how thorough you are. I expect this to be the dominant cost for most game updates. ² I pulled out one of my aging apps and just did all this to check, 10 minutes from "checkout" to "installed in TestFlight". The dreaded App Store review was 3 minutes. This isn't really a fair data point though, Xcode didn't suggest any source code changes so it was just bumping numbers and rebuilding.
  - DaveSapien 4y ago
    If only it where only that simple. There are many dependancies that require some kind of reimplementation, it's a pain. I have made things easier (in the long run) with my last game. I wrote it all in c++ with all dependancies under my control. I was thinking >20 years ahead for that one.
altairprime 4y ago
Were the removed apps compiled with Bitcode enabled in Xcode?
- DaveSapien 4y ago
  Some, most of them not.
  - altairprime 4y ago
    Thanks for answering. I marked my theory disproved in another thread. Appreciated.
    - DaveSapien 4y ago
      No problem, glad to help!
septillianator 4y ago
Seems like there is justification in Seperating them into an archive appstore/section at least.
Aeolun 4y ago
Now ask how much it costs shovelware authors to republish their apps, and they probably do it all the time because the quality sucks.. Guess this ‘remove all the great apps that don’t need to be updated’ strategy is going to backfire.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Is it more profitable in the short term?
- hugi 4y ago
  A better strategy would be to allow app publishers to log in and indicate in some way that the app is still "good" and active. Now I have to make a "fake update" to a perfectly fine app because of this. Of course the best strategy would be to just don't do this at all. I find it offensive that a single company can decide on a whim to erase my perfectly fine software from history, because it's "ancient" in their opinion (two years old).
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    This is more about making sure the app compiles with the latest SDK and whatever requirements that entails. I still have a few crap apps on my phone that look zoomed in because the author never bothered to update them for HiDPI devices - that was half a decade ago.
    - hugi 4y ago
      It really shouldn't be my issue that Apple isn't able to maintain compatibility for two year old apps.
      - interpol_p 4y ago
        They do maintain compatibility, it's just obviously running in compatibility mode because of hardware changes. If your app doesn't account for a notched display, or a retina screen, or multi-tasking or whatever, then there's nothing Apple can do aside from run it as it used to run on older hardware, without supporting the new features.
zouhair 4y ago
It feels like we are back in time before writing existed. I wonder if in 10,000 years from now archeologists will find any real cultural artifact from our time.
- javajosh 4y ago
  Not unless society survives continuously because our artifacts are quite delicate. It's ironic that the clay tablets we found are probably the only things that will survive another few thousand years.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Eh, that's just survivorship bias at work. Of all the clay tablets that did survive, many many more were lost forever. It isn't infeasible that some servers in a well-sited data center could survive. It'd take a lot of careful work to extract the data, but the potential wealth of information from a dump of, say, Wikipedia or any news archive would be massive compared to what previous lost societies left us. Of course, it's equally possible all that survives is the logs of 4chan or Instagram or something equally embarrassing. What works future society think of us then?
    - gyulai 4y ago
      Turning a dump of wikipedia (the kind you get on dumps.wikimedia.org) into a running instance of wikipedia that you can browse is actually insanely hard. I put considerable effort into it a few years back and gave up. Don't know what the state of this is right now. So unless the servers that survive are the ones running wikipedia in production now, archaeologists will be out of luck. But those won't survive, the simple reason being that the people running them now are making continuous changes to them now and there is no guarantee that those changes preserve whatever information future archaeologists will find of value (which we can't really know now). And this is true for much simpler mediums than software as well. Take film for example. For film printed on celluloid, all you need is for a good copy of each reel of each film to survive and you've got pretty much a guarantee that this piece of culture will be preserved somehow. Nowadays films are digital thingamajigs rather than celluloid artefacts and the institutions tasked with looking after that digital cultural heritage go about it with an editorializing rather than archival mindset. (e.g. taxpayer-funded BBC removed an old episode of Fawlty Towers, itself a taxpayer-funded BBC production, from their streaming platform for being racist after the George Floyd incident [1]). Besides: With virtualization and the various forms of infrastructure abstraction in combination with encryption-based security models, even a hypothetical scenario where all human life ceases to exist but all servers somehow survive on the bare metal layer would probably fail to preserve our digitual cultural artefacts. Hard disks owned by private individuals with a "digital hoarder" mindset would probably make for a more useful archaeological find than servers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Germans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Germans
StopDarkPattern 4y ago
You must buy something new from apple every 2 years - OR ELSE

bfelbo 4y ago

How much effort would it be for you to convert your iOS games to HTML5? Then they can never be removed. Very curious as we’re building an iOS/Android platform for HTML5 games. Would love to help save some of these great iOS games being removed by Apple.

DaveSapien 4y ago
Total remakes from basically scratch. I've settled on rolling with c++ with no(minimal) external dependancies as the best solution...still using Unity for some projects, its just so fast to get stuff done!

macinjosh 4y ago

How closely does Apple monitor for changes? Could you simply update the copyright text each year and push an "update" to remain on the store. I can't imagine they have people looking at each app for new levels or features.

meibo 4y ago
You need to recompile/submit with the newest xcode, which is not feasible for games as that would mean having to upgrade the engine.
- DaveSapien 4y ago
  You are spot on, but that might even be the best case scenario. Thing can quickly turn south and cost quite a bit of time.

AlchemistCamp 4y ago

What does it cost to republish them?

ronyeh 4y ago
Time. For a solo / indie shop, you have limited time. Every time macOS/Xcode/iOS updates, some of the iOS APIs are deprecated in favor of "the new better way of doing things". You have to keep up, or else your old apps stop compiling at some point.
jws 4y ago
Best case, check out your code, bump the version number, touch up your copyright date, hit "Run", do your testing¹, hit upload, have a sandwich, check it out in TestFlight, approve a release, maybe check a few boxes that say you aren't shipping super secret encryption technology to shunned nations.² But usually after a few years Xcode will bitch at you about a lot of stuff, so maybe you raise the minimum OS version requirement, click "Fix it" on a lot of API respellings, find a couple that it can't automatically fix so you have to google that a bit. Then test and upload. Maybe get in a fight with Xcode over your signing keys. Sometimes something you were using gets deprecated and you have to use the newer replacement. That takes some coding. It can get ugly if the 'owner' in the app store is not you or is an entity you no longer control. Then you have to get them involved to do the chain of trust signing. If you produced it under contract, you may not be legally allowed to update it without a new contract. ␃ ¹ do your testing is easy to say, but that could take an arbitrarily long time depending on how thorough you are. I expect this to be the dominant cost for most game updates. ² I pulled out one of my aging apps and just did all this to check, 10 minutes from "checkout" to "installed in TestFlight". The dreaded App Store review was 3 minutes. This isn't really a fair data point though, Xcode didn't suggest any source code changes so it was just bumping numbers and rebuilding.
- DaveSapien 4y ago
  If only it where only that simple. There are many dependancies that require some kind of reimplementation, it's a pain. I have made things easier (in the long run) with my last game. I wrote it all in c++ with all dependancies under my control. I was thinking >20 years ahead for that one.

altairprime 4y ago

Were the removed apps compiled with Bitcode enabled in Xcode?

DaveSapien 4y ago
Some, most of them not.
- altairprime 4y ago
  Thanks for answering. I marked my theory disproved in another thread. Appreciated.
  - DaveSapien 4y ago
    No problem, glad to help!

septillianator 4y ago

Seems like there is justification in Seperating them into an archive appstore/section at least.

Aeolun 4y ago

Now ask how much it costs shovelware authors to republish their apps, and they probably do it all the time because the quality sucks.. Guess this ‘remove all the great apps that don’t need to be updated’ strategy is going to backfire.

guerrilla 4y ago
Is it more profitable in the short term?
hugi 4y ago
A better strategy would be to allow app publishers to log in and indicate in some way that the app is still "good" and active. Now I have to make a "fake update" to a perfectly fine app because of this. Of course the best strategy would be to just don't do this at all. I find it offensive that a single company can decide on a whim to erase my perfectly fine software from history, because it's "ancient" in their opinion (two years old).
- theshrike79 4y ago
  This is more about making sure the app compiles with the latest SDK and whatever requirements that entails. I still have a few crap apps on my phone that look zoomed in because the author never bothered to update them for HiDPI devices - that was half a decade ago.
  - hugi 4y ago
    It really shouldn't be my issue that Apple isn't able to maintain compatibility for two year old apps.
    - interpol_p 4y ago
      They do maintain compatibility, it's just obviously running in compatibility mode because of hardware changes. If your app doesn't account for a notched display, or a retina screen, or multi-tasking or whatever, then there's nothing Apple can do aside from run it as it used to run on older hardware, without supporting the new features.

zouhair 4y ago

It feels like we are back in time before writing existed. I wonder if in 10,000 years from now archeologists will find any real cultural artifact from our time.

javajosh 4y ago
Not unless society survives continuously because our artifacts are quite delicate. It's ironic that the clay tablets we found are probably the only things that will survive another few thousand years.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Eh, that's just survivorship bias at work. Of all the clay tablets that did survive, many many more were lost forever. It isn't infeasible that some servers in a well-sited data center could survive. It'd take a lot of careful work to extract the data, but the potential wealth of information from a dump of, say, Wikipedia or any news archive would be massive compared to what previous lost societies left us. Of course, it's equally possible all that survives is the logs of 4chan or Instagram or something equally embarrassing. What works future society think of us then?
  - gyulai 4y ago
    Turning a dump of wikipedia (the kind you get on dumps.wikimedia.org) into a running instance of wikipedia that you can browse is actually insanely hard. I put considerable effort into it a few years back and gave up. Don't know what the state of this is right now. So unless the servers that survive are the ones running wikipedia in production now, archaeologists will be out of luck. But those won't survive, the simple reason being that the people running them now are making continuous changes to them now and there is no guarantee that those changes preserve whatever information future archaeologists will find of value (which we can't really know now). And this is true for much simpler mediums than software as well. Take film for example. For film printed on celluloid, all you need is for a good copy of each reel of each film to survive and you've got pretty much a guarantee that this piece of culture will be preserved somehow. Nowadays films are digital thingamajigs rather than celluloid artefacts and the institutions tasked with looking after that digital cultural heritage go about it with an editorializing rather than archival mindset. (e.g. taxpayer-funded BBC removed an old episode of Fawlty Towers, itself a taxpayer-funded BBC production, from their streaming platform for being racist after the George Floyd incident [1]). Besides: With virtualization and the various forms of infrastructure abstraction in combination with encryption-based security models, even a hypothetical scenario where all human life ceases to exist but all servers somehow survive on the bare metal layer would probably fail to preserve our digitual cultural artefacts. Hard disks owned by private individuals with a "digital hoarder" mindset would probably make for a more useful archaeological find than servers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Germans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Germans

StopDarkPattern 4y ago

You must buy something new from apple every 2 years - OR ELSE