Re:Vesper, Adieu
by icebraining on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @02:14AM
(#12350070)
Yeah, cloud, app stores and breaking platform APIs. I know people who still use ATnotes on their Windows 7 machines, despite the fact that it was discontinued more than a decade ago.
Still, PC era shareware (the equivalent to these small apps made by a couple developers) wasn't immune to cloud dependency, particularly when they had online license validation mechanisms.
App stores also contribute in that an app without a dev account ceases to exist and can't be easily installed by anyone. So if the maintainer goes away so does the app.
In the PC era software could live forever. Even closed source PC apps can still easily be run today on emulators.