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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, there are always going to be changes with upgrades that break things, even if not intended -- especially when apps inadvertently rely on undocumented API behavior.

But on the other hand, that's a well-known difference between Apple and Microsoft philosophies. Microsoft bends over backwards to support old software (e.g. hard-coding old buggy/undefined behavior for specific legacy apps), while Apple fully expects app developers to maintain their software and upgrade it as necessary with each new iOS release, using new versions of libraries etc.

I don't think either is "correct", they're just different philosophies. The Microsoft way leads to incredibly complicated OS behavior that must be hell on the Windows devs. But if you develop an iOS app, you should know this going into it, that you'll need to budget for a certain level of occasional maintenance or risk that the app breaks.

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The that cultural difference causes some pretty important secondary differences too - for example, Microsoft's way enables software to be a product - written once, working approximately forever; Apple's way pretty much forces a subscription model.

Yeah, this was well explained by Joel Spolsky in this essay from 2004

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

starting at § "The Two Forces at Microsoft" where he describes the Raymond Chen Camp vs. the MSDN Magazine Camp.

The Microsoft way is absolutely better than the Apple way. Platform holders, Apple in particular, reap enormous profits. They have at least some basic responsibility here. It's hard? Tough shit, software is hard. Start putting in the work for your 400k TC.

This is also why Apple will never be a long-term gaming platform for anything other than gacha pull and otherwise exploitative games. I can still play the original Dark Souls with DSFix on modern Windows (or Linux via Proton for that matter). The game is timeless and should never be lost to lazy platform holders.

The problem is that all the legacy bits of Windows makes development (and usage) of Windows software harder. So it’s a trade off for developers - easier initial development but harder maintenance, or harder initial development and easier maintenance. I’d personally choose the former (what Apple provides), but either way is a reasonable choice to make.

I think you can frame it as a neutral tradeoff in the abstract, but Dark Souls is a monumental piece of cultural heritage and is clearly and unequivocally better than gacha games.

Except that it's easy to make the exact opposite argument: that making apps is so tremendously easy and cheap compared to making hardware, or even writing and physically distributing software back in the 1980's and 1990's. It's never been so easy for a handful of developers to to make millions via app stores and cloud computing. So app makers have at least some basic responsibility here. It's hard? Tough shit, software is hard. Start putting in the minimal work to keep your apps up to date.

Apps are more interoperable than every before so the idea of something you write once and never touch again stops making any sense. Encryption standards progress, privacy entitlements become more granular, image formats get added, retina compatibility becomes expected, dark mode becomes expected, etc. etc. etc.

Microsoft is not shipping mobile phone software! I fault them for breaking older apps, yes, but this is not always the case. I have an app that is 7 years old and it hasn't been updated for any phone since the iphone 7. I see the black bars when I open it. It's a drink making app that since got taken off the app store, but I'll never delete it because it was a one time purchase and got me access to the easiest explanations for making drinks I have ever seen in my entire life. And every drink is there. Apple has never, I repeat *never*, broken it for me. It still opens.

Your mileage may vary. I think backwards compatibility is important, but we can't expect Apple to do a quality test on every last app on the app store for hours and hours making sure it opens on every phone on every software version.

> that since got taken off the app store

I believe it's Apple's policy to remove apps that are not upgraded, even if they're still working. Which is baffling and highly questionable IMHO.

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