The announcement, released on Friday afternoon, states in part: As part of the App Store Improvement process, app developers who have not been updated in the last three years and fail to meet a minimum download limit – meaning that the app has not been downloaded at all or very few times during a 12-month rolling period – receive an email notifying them that their application has been detected for possible removal from the App Store. We’ve heard about these emails in the past – last week, developers like Robert Kabwe and Emilia Lazer-Walker reported that they received them and expressed their discomfort that they had 30 days to update their applications, otherwise they would have been removed from the shop. Other developers shared similar experiences on Twitter, saying the policy and time they were given to make changes was unfair to freelance developers. They also expressed deep concern about Apple’s decision to shut down an entire category of applications because it believes they do not belong in its store. Lazer-Walker argued that games should be allowed to end and that they can still be valuable without being a service. Kabwe came up with a similar idea, noting that you can still buy console games from the 2000s. To put it another way: Apple removes these apps a bit like removing movies from the iTunes Store just because they appear with black lines on modern TVs (although I understand that interpreting a video signal is less complicated than executing code). Sometimes the software is made. I know people expect growth and change and improvement forever (for free), but sometimes software ends up being shipped and that’s the end of the story. The “old” and the “fixed” are not situations of failure. On the contrary – they show success. https://t.co/ELEzf1jjOj – arclight (@arclight) 24 April 2022 Apple’s explanation clarifies why, as some developers have noted, it seemed to apply the rules inconsistently. For example, one developer noted that Pocket God, a popular game from the early days of the iPhone, has not been updated for seven years, but is still in the App Store. Apple basically says it’s still running because it’s still popular. From one point of view, this reasoning is not necessarily combined with the first half of Apple’s post, where it says it removes old applications to ensure “user confidence in quality applications” and improve traceability, security and privacy. the user experience. After all – if an application is problematic because it is outdated, more downloads would make a bad application a bigger problem. Who gets hurt if there is an old app that almost no one downloads? But Apple says it does not want the App Store to be filled with apps that both developers and users have forgotten. It has several problems that make it easy for users to find good applications as they are and it is easy to imagine that Apple sees deleting old, seemingly irrelevant applications as a good solution. While Apple’s post may seem like a slap in the face to developers who are worried about losing something they spent real time and effort on, the company is expanding a tiny olive branch. His post notes that anyone who receives a notification from now on – and those who have already received a notification – will have 90 days instead of 30 to update their application before it is removed. While this will make it easier for developers to store their applications, it does not allow programs to “exist as complete objects”, as Lazer-Walker put it. Apple, it seems, is only interested in the complete items that still stand out.
