Maybe it’s worse for games, but I’ve been maintaining non-game apps on both iOS and Android for many years and keeping the iOS halves functional has generally been pretty chill. Updates aren’t required all that often and it’s rare that APIs break entirely on me, especially if targeting older SDKs. Usually the worst post-WWDC fallout is needing to recompile the app in question with minimal changes.

By comparison, Android is much worse. The Play Store kicks you off for not submitting updates much more quickly and the whole ecosystem is in a permanent state of simultaneous flux and obsolescence. Whatever deity help you if you let an Android project collect dust for a year or two… you’re gonna be fighting battles on multiple fronts getting everything up to date. Gradle conflicts, APIs getting deprecated without fully baked replacements, divergence in behavior between OS versions… it’s a real hoot.

>Usually the worst post-WWDC fallout is needing to recompile the app in question with minimal changes.

But that still means that any app that is not actively maintains dies very quickly. I've got software I wrote for Windows 7 that still runs fine on Windows 11.

Perhaps, but when maintenance is just ticking boxes and recompiling most years, I find it not much of a bother.

Also far-reaching backwards compatibility comes with its own downsides. It’s more of a tradeoff than a boon.

well it also made macOS the nicer platform with modern, well maintained apps for the past 2 decades.

Unfortunately well-written native macOS desktop software (Apple's own apps are sometimes exceptions, if we ignore monstrosities like the Music app) seems to be dying (new "desktop" software often being a wrapper for a clunky web app), while half of my Steam library that used to run on macOS no longer does. (And removing Rosetta2 might kill the other half.)

A subset of Rosetta 2 will be kept around for game compatibility iirc. Don't know what it entails or how it would work though

I am crossing my fingers.

Contempt. use any apple device 2 updates back or more. you're screwed.

You would accept this in no other place in life, except that apple gives it for free, and puts a 'security' sticker on the box.

It's a racket. Planned obsolescence 2.0 - Users forced to update, update removes features, breaks working apps, breaks paid for ip ( literally removed from phones), apple blames the devs. bullshit.

It mostly works?

yes. and it's what I use every day.

the plan evil though.

It is a shame that you can't choose to get security updates only without app-breaking feature changes. So you have to update (because security, actively exploited vulnerabilities, etc.) but then your apps (mostly paid apps in my case since I dislike subscriptions and obnoxious f2p monetization schemes) break.

> iOS developers have to continuously update each game yearly simply to keep it working

This is usually not the case

> This is absolutely correct. Instead of maintaining any sort of ABI and API stability, Apple offloads a constant burden of maintenance updates across thousands of developers, just to keep existing apps from breaking every year with a new iOS version. This takes time which could be spent in more productive ways such as fixing bugs, adding features, or developing new apps. It seems like the wrong trade-off, since stability would offer huge, multiplicative benefits across the whole ecosystem. Apple does seem to want apps to die to mitigate the glut of shovelware in the app store, but there has to be a better way (human curation still seems like the only reliable approach for app surfacing and discovery.)

I keep trying to explain this to people but it's hard enough to describe the issue, even harder to get people to care, and an impossible battle to change Apple. I don't actually think they're doing this to kill old apps. I think it's a very cynical and calculated plan to require developers to actively maintain their applications, *thereby requiring the use of subscriptions as the only viable business model for developers.* That is Apple's primary revenue stream by far, and they're making far more money now that we have to subscribe to workout apps instead of buying them once and using them for years.

>thereby requiring the use of subscriptions as the only viable business model for developers. That is Apple's primary revenue stream by far, and they're making far more money now that we have to subscribe to workout apps instead of buying them once and using them for years.

Apple earns almost twice as much revenue from selling iPhones ($210B per year) than it does from "Services" ($109B), and "Services" includes far more than just App store commissions.

https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/11/apples-fiscal-2025-in-cha...

https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment

However, I do see the incentive for Apple to push subscriptions due to the enormous scalability and thus resilient margins.

Thanks for the correction. I should have said profit, and I should clarify further: gross profit for the App Store and global iPhone production is similar ($84B and $88B), but the App Store and other services have nearly double the profit margin and is growing much faster than physical products.

Apple has been dropping older subsystems and backwards compatibility layers long before app subscriptions were the default way people got paid for software. The 68k -> PPC transition happened in the mid 90's and 68k support was dropped entirely somewhere around OS 8 and the start of the iMac era. The Carbon framework might have been the most long running one, going from about 2000 to 2012 for deprecation and basically ending once the 64 bit transition happened around 2018. The PPC -> Intel transition, including the original Rosetta emulator was ~2005-2011. The app store itself only debuted in 2011.

I do agree that Apple does this in part to force developers to either stay active and maintain their apps or stop shipping for the platform, but I personally posit that the move of more and more apps to subscription models is simply due to how many more apps are connected and user expectations for update timeliness (and the devaluing of updates both by increased popularity of "free as in beer" open source apps and also the distribution of no-cost OS updates by Apple. People expect more for free and expect it as soon as someone notices a problem. I think the idea of not only waiting a year or more to have new features or some bugs fixed and then on top of that having to shell out more money for that is just not something people are as wiling to do. So subscription models become necessary to fund the continuous work that goes into keeping up with all the new trends. Apple's dropping of old libraries and frameworks is part of that churn, but it's only one part in a sea of other pressures driving the subscription model.

Losing carbon support on the Mac, and 32-bit support on both macOS and iOS was painful.

I particularly miss games like Chaos Rings 1&2, which are no longer playable and don't seem to be available anywhere.

Another bad change was when iPhone "backups" stopped including apps, which now have to be re-downloaded (which does not work for apps which have been removed from the app store.)

> thereby requiring the use of subscriptions as the only viable business model for developers

This is ugly because I hate subscriptions, but I believe that the constant maintenance burden makes subscriptions more appealing for developers.

But why would you want to subscribe to a game on iOS that you could just buy once and run forever on another platform?

Ios actually is far better than macos for old apps. I have a few ancient maybe 8-10 year old ios apps on my iphone that have not received updates and still work fine. Can’t say the same for macos because they decided to drop 32bit support.