Very true. Apple has removed several of my games (all working perfectly fine) because, well, they felt like it:
> Since this app hasn’t been updated within the last three years [...] it has been removed from the App Store
> Since this app hasn’t been updated within the last three years [...] it has been removed from the App Store
I also greatly dislike how iOS takes the backwards approach of offloading backward compatibility as a yearly support burden multiplied across every developer - rather than maintaining it in the OS.
Platforms are supposed to absorb developer pain for multiplicative benefit - not the other way around.
Among modern operating systems, iOS is probably the worst in terms of backwards compatibility but it’s also one of the most pleasant to develop for — UIKit/Cocoa is unrivaled in terms of both breadth and depth. One can easily build a top class iOS app with few or no third party dependencies, which is not the case on most other platforms. I don’t think that’s a coincidence… if the iOS dev team were encumbered with maintaining backwards compatibility for upwards of a decade it would be much more difficult to build such a complete and polished toolkit.
I wouldn't even be opposed to older apps running in some sort of seamless-to-the-user virtual machine.
It blows my goddamn mind.