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Comment by II2II | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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?

> 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.

> 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.

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

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