Recently, several developers complained that Apple threatened to remove their applications from the App Store because they had not been updated for a “significant period of time.” Now the company has responded by issuing a press release stating that no one is downloading the apps anyway.
The announcement, published on Friday night, reads in part:
As part of the process of improving the App Store, application developers who have not been updated in the last three years and fail to meet the minimum download threshold, which means that the application has not been downloaded at all or very few times in a period of 12 months – Receive an email notifying them that their app has been identified for possible removal from the App Store.
We’ve heard of these emails before – last week developers like Robert Cabwe and Emilia Laser-Walker announced they had received them and expressed concern that they had 30 days to update their apps or would be removed from the store. Other developers shared similar experiences on Twitter, saying the policies and time given to them to make changes were unfair to indie developers.
They also expressed deeper concern about Apple’s decision to delete a whole class of applications because it believes they do not belong to its store. Lazer-Walker argues that the games should be allowed to be completed and that they can still be valuable without being a favor. Kabwe expressed a similar idea, pointing out that you can still buy console games from the 2000s. To put it another way: removing these apps from Apple is a bit like removing movies from the iTunes Store just because they appear with black bars on modern TVs (although I understand that interpreting a video signal is less complicated than running it. code).
Sometimes software is made. I know the world expects growth, change and improvement forever (for free), but sometimes software is ready and delivered and that’s the end of the story.
“Old” and “stable” are not states of failure. On the contrary, they show success. https://t.co/ELEzf1jjOj
– arclight (@arclight) April 24, 2022
Apple’s explanation clarifies why, as some developers have noted, it seems 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 in seven years, but is still in the App Store. Apple essentially says it’s still active because it’s still popular.
From one point of view, this reasoning does not necessarily coincide with the first half of Apple’s publication, which says it removes old applications to ensure “consumer confidence in quality applications” and improve discovery, security and privacy and the user experience. After all, if an app is problematic because it’s outdated, more downloads would make a bad app a bigger problem. Who is harmed if there is an outdated application that almost no one downloads?
But Apple says it doesn’t want the App Store to be cluttered with apps that both developers and users have forgotten about. It has enough problems that make it easier for users to find good apps as they are, and it’s easy to imagine that Apple sees deleting old, seemingly inappropriate apps as a good solution.
While Apple’s publication may seem like a slap in the face to developers worried about losing something they’ve put in real time and effort into, the company is expanding a small olive branch. His publication 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 should make it easier for developers to keep their applications, it doesn’t allow programs to “exist as completed objects,” as Lazer-Walker put it. Apple seems to be only interested in finished items that still get eyeballs.
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