It's not that games from 2009 don't run, only games that haven't been updated since 2009 don't run. All a developer needs to do is recompile and push an update.
I think you have no experience with updating legacy iOS applications to modern SDKs. It is not just a matter of "recompile and push", it is:
* Ensuring your code still works now that CGFloat and ints change size (can easily trip up code, I've seen things fail subtly and then grow into huge errors with combinations of NSInteger and "-1" etc)
* Updating all UI to handle new behavior (yes, just linking with a new compiler will automatically opt-in to new behavior that might totally break interactions and taps)
* If your app is really old, rewrite all UI to not assume a 320px wide screen (this can be brutal)
* Handling new restrictions and requirements such as supporting IPv6-only network (fun if your app is used to configure an IoT device over IPv4 LAN), and Transport Security (fun if your app allows users to connect to random servers around the world)
* Handling new permission models for camera/gps/contacts/photo library/audio library access, including refactoring your code to deal with asynchronous results
* Updating all your graphic assets for @2x and @3x resolution as well as new app icon sizes (hope you still have those .PSD files, and hope your designer wasn't doing pixel-perfect painting for your bitmaps!)
* The original developer must still be in business, still pay the $100/year developer fee, and still have the source code and the talent to fix it.
And this is the relatively easy case of an app built using Apple technologies.
It can be much more difficult if you built a game using a cross platform game engine filled with binary 32bit libraries. If the engine is still around, you might be able to pay for a license for a newer version of the engine, but then you likely also need to deal with the SDK and format changes in the new engine as well as any iOS specific things you have.
Still, if software is your business and this software in particular makes you money, it's really not _that_ expensive to do.
As someone who has been developing iOS apps for 8 years, it’s preetty easy. If you wrote code that depended upon sizes of fundamental types, you didn’t write good code. if you weren’t using resources to lay out UI, you didn’t think ahead. 2x and 3x graphics can be created from your originals with OSX preview.
It’s far easier to rewrite old apps today than ever. The tools are far better. The APIs are far better. Asynchronous code is trivial to implement with GCD nowadays.
The real truth is you won’t pay the developer for their time, so they won’t give it to you. It has nothing to do with Apple.
I didn’t say it was impossible, I was just argung that updating legacy apps is a lot more work than clicking a recompile button and uploading the result. The loser here is the end-user, who can’t access their files inside legacy apps or control devices that depend on legacy apps or even just enjoy a paid-for game. And that’s all on Apple, who surely could have offered 32bit support for several more years, even if they froze the api level on 32bit uikit/corefoundation to iOS10, and as an optional on-first-use download, for existing app-owners only (so obviously they get to hold their app store storefront clean).
That could easily be solved by offering 32bit support as an optional download, just like how 32bit windows10 prompts to install the 16bit ntvdm support libraries on first use. Or just like how iOS itself mounts a developer disk image provided on-demand by xcode during the first debug session, adding more items to the general ios settings menu in the process
A few hundred megabytes is certainly a small price to pay for users who need those legacy apps to unlock files/documents stored inside or the features the app might to provide to interface with legacy IoT devices or even a car.
It's a huge price to pay for a user who doesn't understand that their decrepit app is the reason the rest of their phone doesn't work as well as it used to.
The simple solution is for developers to recompile the apps. The developers of any apps that are truly still needed by customers, can easily convince those customers to pay for the update.
But the phone worked "as well as it used to" on iOS10 with support for 32bit apps. So why would it not work as well as that? I think what will happen is the user don't understand why their precious legacy app doesn't launch at all.
Also, they could just continue to pop up an alert saying "this app may slow down your phone" like they already did in iOS10.
Also, I doubt there is much of a performance hit anyways. For example, the current facebook app is 64bit and it is a slouch to start.
Exactly. I had a legacy app like this that was generating next to nothing in revenue. I lol'd at all the work I would have had to do to bring it up two versions of iOS, and left it alone.
I made a game in 2009, it was quite popular, got a bunch of positive reviews, I gave it away for free.
I had to keep giving Apple £100/year just to let people keep downloading the game for free. At some point I tried recompiling it for a newer iOS, and I get hundreds of message about depricated APIs that I had to change to get it accepted by Apple. Instead I let it drop.
I can't even put a copy online for people to download, the game is just dead and gone thanks to Apple. I can still run Windows games from 20 year ago and with DOSbox, DOS games from 30 years ago. My own iOS game on the other hand is dead, never to be revived.
This is a pretty fascinating anecdote to me, as I preserve software as long as I possibly can (still having boxes of games like Marathon, Myst, Spectre, SimCity for example). I had a strong feeling that the ultra-closed App Store would result in extremely ephemeral software. It's very difficult to preserve software that is so "encumbered" and reliant on the continued distribution by a 3rd party who sets all the rules.
If your interested seeing it continue to run and are up for selling it message me. I buy old ios apps that still trickle in a small amount of sales and keep them running.
>I can't even put a copy online for people to download, the game is just dead and gone thanks to Apple. I can still run Windows games from 20 year ago and with DOSbox, DOS games from 30 years ago.
On the other hand, thanks to this kind of "burning bridges" users are not tied to 20 year old compatibility kludges and legacy BS in the OS and libs.
>My own iOS game on the other hand is dead, never to be revived.
Which, App Store or not is the fate of tons of games -- most 8bit/16bit era games we have, we just have thanks to emulators.
I don't mind fixing it up if you still want to publish it. Put it on github and post a link to the thread? Or you can email me at lnanek at gmail. I need an app store account for my own apps anyway.
Those probably are the only valid options. But let's face it. Unless the game was extremely popular, or has a cult following, it is rather unlikely that anyone will want to pick it up and run with it.
I play board games and there are games nowadays that require an app to play (see for example Alchemists). I've argued that this is a bad idea since at some point the apps will probably stop working as we see happening in iOS 11. But people always argue back that someone will be sure to create a version of the app to keep it going. I may be a cynic, but I think that is incredibly naive to believe that will happen.
I used to have a board game or two that required a VHS tape. Sure, VCRs exist and can be found, but it’s such an outdated technology that people aren’t going to search them out. I know there are some games that require LaserDisc too, same thing but even worse. It’s not necessarily a new development.
Probably won't happen if he just throws it out on github, but if he can show and prove that it "was quite popular, got a bunch of positive reviews" somehow AND gave some brief overview of the project and effort required to update it then the chance is higher.
I think you stopped reading before you reached this part:
>At some point I tried recompiling it for a newer iOS, and I get hundreds of message about depricated APIs that I had to change to get it accepted by Apple.
You seem to have no understanding whatsoever of the funding system and life cycle of games.
Games are generally funded by a publisher who retains all rights to the game, the developer is contracted for some time, then goes on to work on something else. A publisher is not going to pay for the update of a paid-upfront game from 5+ years ago, there's no ROI in that. Without a continuous revenue stream, publishers don't keep updating games.
Furthermore, both publisher and original developer can fold, leaving the game orphaned.
I have a ton of apps no longer supported on iOS 11. They come in 2 main groups:
- apps which were abandoned
- apps which were replaced by a successor. In the absence of update fees, this is the easiest way to generate new revenue for continuous updates. I am happy to pay for app maintenance, but this scheme means, that there is no automatic data migration from the old to the new apps.
Hello, Omnigraffle. I bought this on iPad, used this something like, three times before having a need to use it over a year later and "Sorry! There is a new version to buy and your version is no longer supported, or runs!". It wasn't cheap, as apps go.
Never, ever buying anything from Omni, ever again.
Edit: To add details, I bought this for £35 on iOS 7. When iOS 8 came around, it was discontinued, left to crash on open, and you had the "opportunity" to buy version 2 all over again.
That seems wrong. I wonder if you could petition apple for a refund in the case where developers purposefully sunset an app purposefully but for no technical reason (which I understand isn't really what this thread about, nor may not match your situation entirely).
I don't think the dev went in and broke the old version. I think it didn't run on the new OS and they built a new version that did. This happens in the desktop space as well where there are apps that worked on Windows 7 but don't on Windows 10. You can buy a newer version that does work on Windows 10. This is generally for much more involved apps that are quite expensive to build and to buy.
Similar with Tweetbot, which seems to release a new version as a separate app every couple years or so? The version I reluctantly bought (knowing they do this) is no longer updated but had long-standing bugs even when it was being actively developed. The experience makes me reluctant to buy any apps at all on App Store, tbh.
You pay $5 for Tweetbot, and they work delivering updates for years before asking for another (usually b/c of many new features or hard work updating the UI for modern iOS)
It's one of the most polished apps around. You don't owe the Developer's time indefinitely from one $5 purchase, and you're free to move to an alternative. I'm happy to continue to support the apps I love -- they generally aren't asking a whole lot.
Additionally, in the case of Twitter clients, they also can't add a lot of new customers b/c Twitter has capped their allowed clients. If they didn't charge customers again, they wouldn't be able to sustain the work with new ones.
Same thing with WeightBot, which I have been using for years and now doesn't work with iOS 11, and I'm losing years of data. I would pay for an update to the app, but it's completely abandoned.
I also loved weightbot, but gave up on it long ago. You might be able to pull the data off with one of the filesystem, readers, if that's worth anything to you at all.
Same with the American History Dictionary of the English Language. The app costs about $30 and they release a new version every year or two and kill the old version. After the second time this happened I stopped playing that game, which is a shame since this is my favorite dictionary.
What do you mean by that? Of course a developer doesn't have to support version X forever, but the damn thing no longer runs at all? This was paid software. I guess OP was renting it for some undisclosed period of time, and you think that's acceptable?
Unfortunately a lot of developpers will not be able to update their app with the new Apple Guideline released this Year. They are currently blocking any app that look alike or have the same features. The guideline is so vague that a huge amount of Developpers including my company are forced to remove their apps or wait until apple removes them with no ability to update the app or communicate to the users that the app is being removed.
