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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

This has been so desperately needed for years, but the conventional wisdom was Apple cared more about being able to claim that they had 12 million apps (or whatever) than 2 million decent apps.

I've searched in the last few months and found apps that had screenshots that were clearly from iOS 4 or 5.

David Smith said he had been working on a piece before this was announced (1) and believed about 50% of apps never got updated.

Also the fixes to stop things from being named "Candy Soul Saga Crush Game Match Three Slots For The Win Pokemon Insurance Dating Fun Free Time" is a serious improvement too.

Random idea based on other stuff I saw app developers talking about on Twitter the other day: is this the first steps in going 64-bit only next year? If the apps haven't been updated they can be pulled before iOS 11 comes out and then OS update wouldn't get blamed.

1) https://twitter.com/_DavidSmith/status/771405838607089665

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There are still apps in the store I made years ago for a company that no longer exists. They still kinda work, but not very well since the company's servers went offline.

It seems like these things might resolve themselves in a lot of cases if Apple charged something small like a $1 every year to keep an app in the store.

Who pays the the dev program license?

I thought they were pulled from the App Store if the developer account hosting them was not renewed? Or did that change?

They are. It's pretty much the only reason I keep renewing my certificate.

It would be nice if there were some kind of per-app charge because some of the spam app houses (who just churn out junk trying to trick people) must have TONS of apps and adding that little cost (maybe $10 to publish the first time, $5 a year) might be enough to cut down own it.

I remember running into a developer who made an app to track inventory for a thing. Then I saw that he had the same app, with a different color, title, and icon, replicated over and over in the store charging ~$5 for each one. So, one app for Lego, one app for Magic the Gathering, and a few more for a few different things. Just change the name, color and title and resubmit. Boom, new app, new revenue stream.

I've had an app in there since there were less than 1,000 apps in the entire store. It still works, but I haven't updated it. Been waiting for Apple to pull it...surprised it's taken this long.

Can you not request that they pull it?

Yes, you can remove it from the store. Past purchasers can still download it but only from their Purchases page.

Guess now they'll have to settle for just "Candy Soul Saga Crush Game Match Three Slots FTW"

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple also followed this up with some more manual vetting of app names. I'm not sure if this part of the review guidelines is new, but it seems relevant:

> 2.3.7 Choose a unique app name, assign keywords that accurately describe your app, and don’t try to pack any of your metadata with trademarked terms, popular app names, or other irrelevant phrases just to game the system. App names must be limited to 50 characters and should not include terms or descriptions that are not the name of the app. Apple may modify inappropriate keywords at any time.

This is one of those rules that has had basically zero enforcement for years. I hope it changes with the rest of this.

The app store, if you follow all the rules, could be such a great place. But they haven't bothered to enforce so many of their rules (except in capricious cases where they wanted to get rid of something) that there is a TON of junk in there and the store is almost unusable.

The 50 character limit is new. To quote an email from Apple about 9 hours ago: "App names you submit in iTunes Connect for new apps and updates will now be limited to no longer than 50 characters."

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