Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

I don't think culling games/apps based on age is the right approach to improving discoverability.

I don't see Nintendo removing old Switch games from the eShop.

I don't see Apple Music removing the Beatles because they haven't updated recently.

My recommendation, which Apple's (obnoxious) ad business would never accept, would be to

1. Remove the obnoxious and generally useless ads which eat up the top half of the first page of app search on the iPhone.

2. Improve app search with more options and a fast, responsive UI. Also they might consider allowing you to consider ratings from other sources such as critical reviews vs. user reviews (a la metacritic.)

3. Better human curation with more categories. This is the same approach that Apple Music takes and it seems to work well. Games should have Artist/Studio/Developer pages as well as Essentials lists to facilitate discovery. Same with genre/category essentials, which have a rotating list that can be saved/bookmarked.

> I don't see Apple Music removing the Beatles because they haven't updated recently.

I wish I could upvote you for that multiple times!

They would ask the Beatles copyright owners to update their format if they posted an old 8 track or vinyl in to the music store though, right? Audio formats change, just at a more glacial pace than software dependencies. There is remastering and all that too.

An 8 track is many decades old. TFA refers to an app that hasn't been updated in three (3) years.

It has probably been remastered, which is about the same as recompiling

The missing point is that they are culling apps based upon age and downloads. I think this is a reasonable criteria if Apple is trying to make space for popular and potentially upcoming apps. Yes, space is an issue if you think of it in terms of the customer's attention span.

The real problem is that developers have no choice except to offer their app through Apple's store. There is no room for the developer to offer their labour of love or niche product in a storefront that better serves their needs, or even from their own website.

> The real problem is that developers have no choice except to offer their app through Apple's store

How is this different from other walled garden game systems/game stores like Nintendo's eShop?

Yet they seem to keep older games and apps, even niche titles for a limited audience (such as music production apps or BASIC programming apps) which I greatly appreciate.

I would agree that discoverability isn't great on the eShop, but there are dozens of enthusiast web sites which are pretty good for game discovery (also aggregators like metacritic.)

And, as I noted, I think Apple already has a good approach which they're using with Apple Music - better human curation including category/genre/time period/artist/etc. playlists. Podcasts/radio shows also help.

Many games (at least ones that aren't in the "live service" category) are more akin to movies, music, or books than to some sort of perishable produce, so a curation approach that balances older content with new content makes sense.

It depends on how you view your phone. Is it a single use appliance? Or is it a general use computer?

Does that really matter? Would Microsoft making a web browser for Xbox[0] make it more general purpose, given you can now bank on it?

0: https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/console...

I wouldn't bank on it.

Consoles are different because they have a limited shelf life. For example, I dug out my PS3 the other day and took a peek at their eshop. The most recent title was three years old. It also sounds like they're going to shut down the PS3 eshop, effectively ending the sale of old games anyhow. Something similar appears to be true for Nintendo. I pulled up their eshop on my 3DS and they have a message saying that it will be impossible to add funds to an account after March 20223. Presumably that means sales will end.

As for other media, brick and mortar retailers were always selective about what they offered. I suspect that we will see something similar happen with their digital variants in the coming years. I also suspect that it will be sales numbers, not human curation, that will be the basis of their decisions.

> if Apple is trying to make space for popular and potentially upcoming apps

“Make space”? This isn’t a shelf. There’s always enough space for digital items.

So do you want to sift through a bunch of apps that don't work on the current version of the operating system or are otherwise significantly dated?

Even in a less wall gardened environment, I'm mostly not interested in running 10 year old applications unless they're something fairly simple that really does do everything required for the purpose and still runs reliably.

In any case, as a user, I probably figure that if an app hasn't been updated in five years, it may or may not work and I'll probably at least subconsciously resent the store's owner a bit for clogging up the store with old stuff.

>I'm mostly not interested in running 10 year old applications unless they're something fairly simple that really does do everything required for the purpose and still runs reliably.

The 10 year old version of AutoCAD still runs, and you can use it today to do a ton of high-value CAD work. Thanks to Microsoft for not arbitrarily blocking it from running.

Yes. But that’s a case of having an old version of a program that you know still runs on a given platform. That’s rather different from looking for a CAD program and deciding to take one that hasn’t been updated for ten years for a spin.

Backwards compatibility benefits current, and future users. I agree that "hasn't been updated" is a concern, but you can also look for "hasn't needed to be updated". If you can obtain a legal copy of 10 year old software, you can use it for the fraction of the cost of the new version.

> So do you want to sift through a bunch of apps that don't work on the current version of the operating system or are otherwise significantly dated?

This is precisely why Google only indexes webpages written in English and are focused on the American market.

When I do a search in English, Google absolutely returns mostly web pages written in English. And, yes, it would be very annoying to the point of being useless if it did otherwise. Presumably if you query it in French, I assume it returns mostly French pages.

So… Do you think this solution could be applicable here?

Which is fine - if there was any other place for iOS apps for those of us that did want niche/old/obscure/historical apps.

Also - there's a cultural preservation issue here as well. That bothers me.

Virtual space only makes sense in terms of floorspace. If you want to access a backroom special-order item (virtually unlimited space here), you should be able to get it by searching for a specific item (or URL).

Removing apps based on downloads or lack of updates is troubling.

> Yes, space is an issue if you think of it in terms of the customer's attention span.

I don't hear independent developers griping that Apple is failing to advertise their apps and bring those apps to the attention of iPhone users. Instead, I hear independent developers griping that Apple is preventing their apps from being run on iPhones.

Therefore, I completely disagree. This is purely a matter of data storage space (cheap and nigh infinite), not a matter of limited attention.

I hear the opposite of you. There are very few serious apps whose code Apple is preventing from being run.

There are huge numbers of good apps on the store that don’t get visibility.

> Yes, space is an issue if you think of it in terms of the customer's attention span.

By that argument they should also get rid of most old music, old books, old movies.

> I think this is a reasonable criteria if Apple is trying to make space for popular and potentially upcoming apps

I do not. Do you think shovelware author x has any issues pushing a new garbage update?

I want the app store to be full of high quality stuff, not recent.

You ignored the part where they also use downloads. If a high-quality app has no downloads, is it useful?

All developers pay an annual tax to Apple, which should cover storage and discoverability at least right?

> I don't see Nintendo removing old Switch games from the eShop.

The difference is that Nintendo shops have a limited shelf life, while App Store is forever(-ish). Nintendo will be shutting down the Wii U and 3DS eShops in 2023.

2023 is 6 years after Wii U was discontinued. Since the platform was frozen in time in 2017, there's no point to game updates.

eShop games still end up sticking around a lot longer, however. The first 3DS eShop games came out in 2012.

Nintendo updated hardware every five to seven years and don’t old eShop apps run within an emulator?

APIs change, hardware changes, the comparison is relatively silly.

Rectangle with capacitive screen is just that. Well designed apps should be robust to improved screen resolution, faster processors or network connectivity.

Older apps don’t properly fit with the curved corners and notch.

The 2022 SE3 has the same 750×1334 rectangle as the 2014 iPhone 6.

The 2018 iPhone X does not.

Android vendors were able to make it work.

Besides, isn’t this the company that allowed you to install iPhone apps on iPads and blow the UI up to 2x size?

Android was always written with the expectation that it would run on a diverse set of hardware.

You could run iPhone 4 apps on iPhone 5 and beyond. But they looked horrible.

Sorry, I think you’re misunderstanding. Android vendors built compatibility layers that allowed 16:9 apps to run on 18:9 and up screens. The apps weren’t built to run on 18:9 screens but the vendors found a way regardless.

Part of what makes iPhones great is that you aren’t running apps sitting on a pile of compatibility hacks. It was all designed to work correct on the exact device you use.

What does the user care if there's a "pile of compatibility hacks" there or not, so long as the app still exists and works as it should?

In the case of Apple removing 32 bit support from the OS first and then the actual processors:

- they care about their apps not being evicted from memory as quickly when they switch apps because memory isn’t taken up by 32 bit and 64 bit versions of shared libraries.

- increased battery life by not having as much RAM - yes RAM takes energy.

- using the die space saved by not having 32 bit instruction decoding means you can use that die space for enhancements that users care about, and decrease the die size to make the phone more battery efficient

- for Mac computers, you have computers that are faster, have more than twice the battery life, are more memory efficient (meaning less swap), and can be fanless without getting hot.

> running apps sitting on a pile of compatibility hacks

You do realise the only reason iphone retina screens became a thing was to enable double pixel scaling because iphone apps at the time were coded to a fixed resolution.

That's the definition of a compatibility hack.

Of course apple being apple they managed to sell it as a feature and made every person who was happy with a 1366x768 laptop suddenly desire a retina display.

Oh no, the horror.

Let the user make the damn choice.

> Rectangle with capacitive screen is just that.

If you think that’s all a smartphone is, then it’s natural to come to the conclusion that the only thing that has changed is speed and resolution.

It also happens to be simply wrong.

That's not all that a smartphone is, but it is most of what a smartphone is.

Most applications basically just need:

- a canvas to paint some bitmaps on

- some way to tell what part of the screen the user tapped on

- a way to get TCP/IP or HTTPS traffic in and out - some sound output

- some persistence

- some way to show notifications

- a few other odds and ends like GPS, sometimes

Almost the entire list been supported on every major platform since the late 2000s. Yes, rich multimedia apps that make good use of additional APIs and hardware features do exist. But it's inappropriate to nuke most old "normal" applications just because old rich multimedia apps stopped working over time.

You seem not to think the features operating system itself provides are part of a smartphone.

Back in the iPhone 4/iPad era, there was no facility within iOS to have responsive screens.

Apple introduced size classes and then you needed to adjust for different views for iPads once they supported more than one app being displayed on the screen.

Apple rightfully got rid of 3/ bit app support on the actual die. It introduced new permission models, design aesthetics change, new accessibility options are added, better APIS are written, etc.

It also ensured that many apps/games that were very successful in their time will never be preserved.

https://youtu.be/KB07oxJkd2g

I bought Crash Bandicot in particular when it first came out for iOS 2. It was broken long before the 32 bit purge.

Rectangle, lol, if only.

Apple should just have fewer apps. I don't see why developers should cater to their customers. They buy less and require more support. They are the worst segment to support.

You’re just wrong. The reason developers support iOS is that iOS users buy more apps.

Are you serious? There's way more revenue to be made on iOS. A lot of Android users spend $0/yr on paid apps.

> A lot of Android users spend $0/yr on paid apps.

As do a lot of iOS users. I think the stat you are looking for is that, on average, iPhone users purchase more apps.

Don't forget to consider Android's massive installed user base in the calculation. Even if Droid users convert to paid at 1/4 the rate of iOS, you can make it up in sheer bulk.

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