I wish I could upvote you for that multiple times!
The real problem is that developers have no choice except to offer their app through Apple's store. There is no room for the developer to offer their labour of love or niche product in a storefront that better serves their needs, or even from their own website.
How is this different from other walled garden game systems/game stores like Nintendo's eShop?
Yet they seem to keep older games and apps, even niche titles for a limited audience (such as music production apps or BASIC programming apps) which I greatly appreciate.
I would agree that discoverability isn't great on the eShop, but there are dozens of enthusiast web sites which are pretty good for game discovery (also aggregators like metacritic.)
And, as I noted, I think Apple already has a good approach which they're using with Apple Music - better human curation including category/genre/time period/artist/etc. playlists. Podcasts/radio shows also help.
Many games (at least ones that aren't in the "live service" category) are more akin to movies, music, or books than to some sort of perishable produce, so a curation approach that balances older content with new content makes sense.
As for other media, brick and mortar retailers were always selective about what they offered. I suspect that we will see something similar happen with their digital variants in the coming years. I also suspect that it will be sales numbers, not human curation, that will be the basis of their decisions.
0: https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/console...
I don't hear independent developers griping that Apple is failing to advertise their apps and bring those apps to the attention of iPhone users. Instead, I hear independent developers griping that Apple is preventing their apps from being run on iPhones.
Therefore, I completely disagree. This is purely a matter of data storage space (cheap and nigh infinite), not a matter of limited attention.
There are huge numbers of good apps on the store that don’t get visibility.
Removing apps based on downloads or lack of updates is troubling.
I do not. Do you think shovelware author x has any issues pushing a new garbage update?
I want the app store to be full of high quality stuff, not recent.
By that argument they should also get rid of most old music, old books, old movies.
“Make space”? This isn’t a shelf. There’s always enough space for digital items.
Even in a less wall gardened environment, I'm mostly not interested in running 10 year old applications unless they're something fairly simple that really does do everything required for the purpose and still runs reliably.
In any case, as a user, I probably figure that if an app hasn't been updated in five years, it may or may not work and I'll probably at least subconsciously resent the store's owner a bit for clogging up the store with old stuff.
The 10 year old version of AutoCAD still runs, and you can use it today to do a ton of high-value CAD work. Thanks to Microsoft for not arbitrarily blocking it from running.
This is precisely why Google only indexes webpages written in English and are focused on the American market.
Also - there's a cultural preservation issue here as well. That bothers me.
The difference is that Nintendo shops have a limited shelf life, while App Store is forever(-ish). Nintendo will be shutting down the Wii U and 3DS eShops in 2023.
2023 is 6 years after Wii U was discontinued. Since the platform was frozen in time in 2017, there's no point to game updates.
If you think that’s all a smartphone is, then it’s natural to come to the conclusion that the only thing that has changed is speed and resolution.
It also happens to be simply wrong.
Most applications basically just need:
- a canvas to paint some bitmaps on
- some way to tell what part of the screen the user tapped on
- a way to get TCP/IP or HTTPS traffic in and out - some sound output
- some persistence
- some way to show notifications
- a few other odds and ends like GPS, sometimes
Almost the entire list been supported on every major platform since the late 2000s. Yes, rich multimedia apps that make good use of additional APIs and hardware features do exist. But it's inappropriate to nuke most old "normal" applications just because old rich multimedia apps stopped working over time.
Apple introduced size classes and then you needed to adjust for different views for iPads once they supported more than one app being displayed on the screen.
Apple rightfully got rid of 3/ bit app support on the actual die. It introduced new permission models, design aesthetics change, new accessibility options are added, better APIS are written, etc.
Besides, isn’t this the company that allowed you to install iPhone apps on iPads and blow the UI up to 2x size?
You could run iPhone 4 apps on iPhone 5 and beyond. But they looked horrible.
You do realise the only reason iphone retina screens became a thing was to enable double pixel scaling because iphone apps at the time were coded to a fixed resolution.
That's the definition of a compatibility hack.
Of course apple being apple they managed to sell it as a feature and made every person who was happy with a 1366x768 laptop suddenly desire a retina display.
- they care about their apps not being evicted from memory as quickly when they switch apps because memory isn’t taken up by 32 bit and 64 bit versions of shared libraries.
- increased battery life by not having as much RAM - yes RAM takes energy.
- using the die space saved by not having 32 bit instruction decoding means you can use that die space for enhancements that users care about, and decrease the die size to make the phone more battery efficient
- for Mac computers, you have computers that are faster, have more than twice the battery life, are more memory efficient (meaning less swap), and can be fanless without getting hot.
Let the user make the damn choice.
As do a lot of iOS users. I think the stat you are looking for is that, on average, iPhone users purchase more apps.
Don't forget to consider Android's massive installed user base in the calculation. Even if Droid users convert to paid at 1/4 the rate of iOS, you can make it up in sheer bulk.
I don't see Nintendo removing old Switch games from the eShop.
I don't see Apple Music removing the Beatles because they haven't updated recently.
My recommendation, which Apple's (obnoxious) ad business would never accept, would be to
1. Remove the obnoxious and generally useless ads which eat up the top half of the first page of app search on the iPhone.
2. Improve app search with more options and a fast, responsive UI. Also they might consider allowing you to consider ratings from other sources such as critical reviews vs. user reviews (a la metacritic.)
3. Better human curation with more categories. This is the same approach that Apple Music takes and it seems to work well. Games should have Artist/Studio/Developer pages as well as Essentials lists to facilitate discovery. Same with genre/category essentials, which have a rotating list that can be saved/bookmarked.