Apple deletes iPhone apps if they are not updated enough

rinaldo00

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As someone who works with 4600+ radio stations around the world, this is going to be fun to have to update all those streaming apps that they use.
 
The pace of phones is really fast. This is generally good for the consumer, but not good for lazy devs. This basically affects zero mainline apps of any sort. But it will eventually remove a lot of trash games and meme apps with generally trash content.
Good software is good software. Not every app needs to be updated. I would rather not have updates for updates sake.
 
The pace of phones is really fast. This is generally good for the consumer, but not good for lazy devs. This basically affects zero mainline apps of any sort. But it will eventually remove a lot of trash games and meme apps with generally trash content.
The article is about apps that already work fine on the latest devices yet Apple is non-intelligently issuing these notices even in such cases.

Never mind the fact that my app has a 5-star rating and was still being downloaded, with no complaints from any of my users [...] If there had been an actual reviewer who checked my outdated app, they would have discovered that I architected the app from the beginning to dynamically scale the UI so it resizes to fit the latest iPhone devices.

Even more frustrating is that while the app itself runs fine on all the latest end-user devices, Apple’s development ecosystem has changed rapidly over the last three years. My old code simply did not work anymore with the latest versions of Xcode. So I had to spend four hours on Saturday upgrading all my platform libraries simply so that I could compile the damn app. And all this effort was ultimately in order to just change the build version number from “1.0” to “1.1”. The UI and functionality remained unchanged since it had already been working as intended!

(Emphasis mine)
 
Good software is good software. Not every app needs to be updated. I would rather not have updates for updates sake.
I don't see how this is a problem. If you haven't updated your app in three years... it sometimes does have compatibility issues with devices or OS versions, and certainly won't take advantage of newer technologies. For that matter, if you're actively supporting the app and want it to stay in the store, surely it won't take much to put out a "x.0.1" update that fixes a minor bug or, as noted, is built using a modern compiler?

If you actually care about supporting your app, this is fine. No app is perfect. And if someone complains because they have to update their platform libraries once every three years... that strikes me more as laziness than anything. You can't be deeply concerned about downloads yet utterly opposed to the idea of investing the barest amount of maintenance work.
 
It would be good practice to review code and make update once in a while. A “It just works” developer can leave the door open to major vulnerabilities. Apple doesn’t like that, and I’m actually glad they enforce updates. Still doesn’t make it a good app or secure app, but it does force the dev to review it.
 
If the iPhone app you developed is working fine and doesn't need to be updated, Apple will delete it from the App Store. What a fun company!



https://vivqu.com/blog/2022/09/25/outdated-apps/
Working fine based on the dev who wrote it?

Sorry but we all know how buggy code is, there can always be improvements, better ways to do things over time, new libraries that come out and of course, get your code audited...

3 year old code, is 3 year old code...willing to bet it has some flaws or is reliant on old libraries...
 
It would be good practice to review code and make update once in a while. A “It just works” developer can leave the door open to major vulnerabilities. Apple doesn’t like that, and I’m actually glad they enforce updates. Still doesn’t make it a good app or secure app, but it does force the dev to review it.
Sad reality, Dev's write code and move on, this is how exploits happen, "Well this app has been running fine for 10 years i dont need to change anything, now I am going to bolt on this new module into my original app and tie it all together with duct tape, look it works! good for another 10 years!"
 
I am not sure what an exploit something running on a super sandboxed environment of iOS for a pure local app like a single player game could be.

Case of dont need to change anything can be legitimate, but if the app is popular in any way with people that care I am not sure the recompile is a big deal. Maybe more an issue for the users (that will loose some death apps if they have to reinstall a new device) than the Devs
 
Well the app in the article has been updated, they just recompiled it with the new libraries in the newer XCode version.

I sort of applaud Apple for this, lots on Twitter complaining that it’s unfair to indi devs?

If you are actively supporting the software yet can’t be bothered to update the library and recompile it once every couple of years to at the very least make sure it’s compatible with the new iOS versions then your not supporting it.

I mean even Google mandates that any apps in the Play store be recompiled every couple of years. They will just delist your stuff if it was compiled with a anything below version x.x and that version changes every couple of months.
 
If it is easy to put and get app outside of the store it would not be a big deal I imagine (and maybe that is the case), with being on the store being a special status will work on your new device affair.

But in my experience in the past getting older version of app on iOS was not that easy.
 
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Working fine based on the dev who wrote it?

Sorry but we all know how buggy code is, there can always be improvements, better ways to do things over time, new libraries that come out and of course, get your code audited...

3 year old code, is 3 year old code...willing to bet it has some flaws or is reliant on old libraries...
Yeah Apple updates their iOS libraries and XCode versions with each iOS release they are constantly depreciating old stuff. A recompile with the new libraries and new XCode every 2 years for an actively supported software should not be a big deal for any developer.
Because if it doesn’t compile in the new version then it won’t run on the new iOS and you have to make changes anyways or have it pulled. It’s a zero sum problem.
 
I am not sure what an exploit something running on a super sandboxed environment of iOS for a pure local app like a single player game could be.

Case of dont need to change anything can be legitimate, but if the app is popular in any way with people that care I am not sure the recompile is a big deal. Maybe more an issue for the users (that will loose some death apps if they have to reinstall a new device) than the Devs
That's the thing. Yes, there can be old apps that are reliable and handle newer devices gracefully... but good grief, throwing a fit because Apple asks for a small amount of work once every three years to maintain a baseline level of support? "How little can I get away with doing?" isn't a healthy mindset for a developer; "I'll put in a reasonable effort to make sure my app is still available to customers" is much better.
 
It is easy to put and get app outside of the store it would not be a big deal I imagine (and maybe that is the case), with being on the store being a special status will work on your new device affair.

But in my experience in the past getting older version of app on iOS was not that easy.
It’s a serious pain, I once had to do it on 12 iPads because the speech and language app we use didn’t work on the new iOS version, but admin didn’t want to fork out the $10k for the new version of the app.
 
Yeah Apple updates their iOS libraries and XCode versions with each iOS release they are constantly depreciating old stuff. A recompile with the new libraries and new XCode every 2 years for an actively supported software should not be a big deal for any developer.
Because if it doesn’t compile in the new version then it won’t run on the new iOS and you have to make changes anyways or have it pulled. It’s a zero sum problem.
Good to know (I am not a dev myself) but presumed as much. I am glad Apple is doing this.
It is the same issue Windows app face, when something as simple as a windows cumulative update comes out, and suddenly an app breaks, because they were referencing some windows file that was updated, vs keeping their app isolated with the libraries it needed, so a windows update would not break it....
 
If it is easy to put and get app outside of the store it would not be a big deal I imagine (and maybe that is the case), with being on the store being a special status will work on your new device affair.

But in my experience in the past getting older version of app on iOS was not that easy.
Android supremacy.
 
I assume most of you did not read the article. The dirty little secret is that this "rule" unfairly targets small developers because if your app gets enough downloads it gets a get out of jail free card on updates.
And to add insult to injury, Apple tells me I could have avoided all this pain if my app was being downloaded above a “minimum download threshold”. The policy is completely silent on what this download number needs to be to avoid getting flagged as outdated–is it hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of downloads a month? This seems like an explicit carve-out in the policy for apps with major marketing budgets. According to industry research, the total marketing spend for app installs is projected to be $61.1 billion in 2022. So it seems like an incredibly bad faith argument to claim that a higher download rate means better quality apps. All a higher download rate means is that more money was probably spent to market and optimize app installs.
Apple also removed a version of my FlickType Keyboard that catered specifically to the visually impaired community, because I hadn't updated it in 2 years. Meanwhile, games like Pocket God have not been updated by the developers for 7 years now:
 
I assume most of you did not read the article. The dirty little secret is that this "rule" unfairly targets small developers because if your app gets enough downloads it gets a get out of jail free card on updates.
You don't need to actually update it, you can recompile and resubmit, without changing the version number. That resets the counter but doesn't count as an update.
 
If the SDK update didn't break things, I could imagine not necessarily, just recompiling the exact same code should pass here no ?
The article addresses this, and updates *did* break the app. It took him 4 hours (admittedly, not a ton of effort) to update the app and bump the version to 1.01.
 
You don't need to actually update it, you can recompile and resubmit, without changing the version number.
Unless things have changed enough with newer versions of Xcode and libraries that you can't recompile without errors, which happened to him.

Pretty much every thing people have said here he addressed in the article, including the fact that the app, in spite of not being updated for 3 years, was still getting a few new downloads a day (IIRC).
 
Unless things have changed enough with newer versions of Xcode and libraries that you can't recompile without errors, which happened to him.

Pretty much every thing people have said here he addressed in the article, including the fact that the app, in spite of not being updated for 3 years, was still getting a few new downloads a day (IIRC).
if you recompile with a new version of Xcode and get errors then your program won't compile for the new iOS either, because you are using something they depreciated which they do a lot.
 
Sad reality, Dev's write code and move on, this is how exploits happen, "Well this app has been running fine for 10 years i dont need to change anything, now I am going to bolt on this new module into my original app and tie it all together with duct tape, look it works! good for another 10 years!"
That would actually pass this "test" since the app would be updated.

Never hear about if it ain't broke don't try to fix it?

Frankly I'm quite baffled by the amount of apple shilling going on in this thread.

Forcing a mandatory update will not make app developers suddenly security experts who review the code for vulnerabilities. They'll just do the minimum to make the code compile again, which actually could introduce new bugs or vulnerabilities to the code that was working fine before. The worst update is the one forced by outside pressures, when you have to work with new versions of libraries, and you just want the damned thing to compile, that's when shit happens.

So no, this has the potential to actually make apps worse, not better. The user looses either way, by either loosing access to the app they were presumably using, or getting an "updated" version with missing functionality or new issues.

At least on android you can use apk to re-install apps that you were using if google decided it needs to go. Like that time when they removed the control software for a $250.000 piece of equipment that we were using and relying on the app being in the store.
 
The article addresses this, and updates *did* break the app. It took him 4 hours (admittedly, not a ton of effort) to update the app and bump the version to 1.01.
It did *not* break the app. It took 4 hours to get her system recent enough to do a meaningless recompile.
Even more frustrating is that while the app itself runs fine on all the latest end-user devices, Apple’s development ecosystem has changed rapidly over the last three years. My old code simply did not work anymore with the latest versions of Xcode. So I had to spend four hours on Saturday upgrading all my platform libraries simply so that I could compile the damn app. And all this effort was ultimately in order to just change the build version number from “1.0” to “1.1”. The UI and functionality remained unchanged since it had already been working as intended!
 
As someone who works with 4600+ radio stations around the world, this is going to be fun to have to update all those streaming apps that they use.
Seems like an easy fix... change version number, modify some code that doesn't matter, upload.
 
Seems like an easy fix... change version number, modify some code that doesn't matter, upload.

That part is easy. Contacting the stations to get assigned access to the apple dev account and the hoops to go though to upload it to Apple Dev account is not. Especially when Apple back end servers get slow and it takes 30 minutes per app.

If it was Google, it would be child's play, I can do 10 stations by the time I do 1 Apple.
 
At least on android you can use apk to re-install apps that you were using if google decided it needs to go. Like that time when they removed the control software for a $250.000 piece of equipment that we were using and relying on the app being in the store.

Hold on. You are using an Apple or Android app to control a $250k piece of machinery? Y'all relying on an third party to be an intermediary between a machine and its control software?
 
Not sure would it possible for something like this to work on the windows platform, but imagine every win32 program-game without an update in the 2020s that they achieve to make it that it cannot work on a fresh windows install, even on a virtual machine....... Yes we would be crying over it obvisouly.
 
if you recompile with a new version of Xcode and get errors then your program won't compile for the new iOS either, because you are using something they depreciated which they do a lot.
You would already know that your app would not work, usually in the windows-unix world, there is a giant gap between a compiled not working if you try to do it with the latest version of the compilers and different sdks and stopping working on an up to date OS, I would imagine that it is almost certainly the case on iOS, they must have a better retro compatibility than that, than not at all and some almost every app in the world stop working until a new compile and update happen from time to time.
 
Maybe they should do that with Windows 12+
Start fresh.... With fresh bugs.
The only answer ever given as to why Windows doesn’t support ARM, or is bloated, or is extremely slow to support new technologies, or is less secure than an open door is always that it’s because Microsoft has to maintain support for abandonware. If not for that, supposedly, Windows would be lean, fast, secure, and could cure male pattern baldness.
 
That would actually pass this "test" since the app would be updated.

Never hear about if it ain't broke don't try to fix it?

Frankly I'm quite baffled by the amount of apple shilling going on in this thread.

Forcing a mandatory update will not make app developers suddenly security experts who review the code for vulnerabilities. They'll just do the minimum to make the code compile again, which actually could introduce new bugs or vulnerabilities to the code that was working fine before. The worst update is the one forced by outside pressures, when you have to work with new versions of libraries, and you just want the damned thing to compile, that's when shit happens.

So no, this has the potential to actually make apps worse, not better. The user looses either way, by either loosing access to the app they were presumably using, or getting an "updated" version with missing functionality or new issues.

At least on android you can use apk to re-install apps that you were using if google decided it needs to go. Like that time when they removed the control software for a $250.000 piece of equipment that we were using and relying on the app being in the store.
Fully aware of "Never hear about if it ain't broke don't try to fix it?" but that also does not mean it is running optimal, or secure and should just be forgotten about, It can be played from both sides, good and bad. Developers should be concerned about security, why DevSecOps came about. Dev's have relied on external security controls to protect their wide open systems, code, access, what ever, that can not be done any more, especially with server-less providers and SaaS services. The code now needs to be secure and kept up to date, some of that responsibility falls on the person who writes the code.

I am not an Apple shiller by any means (sure they are doing this to find a way to make more money off devs to re-submit or something), but I have worked with dev teams long enough and plenty of systems and clients to see the exact thing I noted happen. Old systems "that just work" exploited and the sole cause of an entry into an environment due to using a known exploited library / dll / repo because a dev did not bother to want to update their app cause "it just works" and was left in the corner to churn away.

Also seen old apps built on top of, with out the underlying core of it being updated, eventual leading to massive performance issues and problems. Now, I am not saying this is 100% a dev's fault, as we know, management and those above them, often have the say and are the ones pushing things to be out and delivered yesterday, causing corners to be cut, but lets also be real, a good portion of dev's are lazy and just like to clone repo's, copy paste, compile, ready for prime time! Move on to the next thing....

So where is the happy medium?
 
I don't see how this is a problem. If you haven't updated your app in three years... it sometimes does have compatibility issues with devices or OS versions, and certainly won't take advantage of newer technologies. For that matter, if you're actively supporting the app and want it to stay in the store, surely it won't take much to put out a "x.0.1" update that fixes a minor bug or, as noted, is built using a modern compiler?
If this were done on Android it would drive me up the wall. I have apps on my Android that are far older than 3 years, and still work perfectly fine. I use Revanced for YouTube and I have to disable auto udpates because Google will remove Revanced in favor of the YouTube app. Though next time I reflash my phones rom I will probably avoid Google's software all together just because I don't need that kind of negativity in my life. Nobody has any business removing my apps.
 
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