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 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.