Recently, some developers complained that Apple threatened to remove their apps from the App Store because they had not been updated for a “considerable amount of time.” Now, the company has responded — with a press release, effectively saying no one is downloading the apps.
The notice, issued Friday night, reads in part:
As part of the App Store improvement process, developers of apps that have not updated in the past three years and have not met the minimum download threshold – meaning the app has no downloads at all or very few downloads over a rolling 12-month period – receive to an email informing them that their app has been identified for possible removal from the App Store.
We’ve heard of these emails before – last week, developers like Robert Kabwe and Emilia Lazer-Walker The report got them and said they have 30 days to update their app or they will be removed from the store. Other developers shared similar experiences on Twitter, saying the policy, and the time they were given to make changes, was unfair to indie developers.
They also expressed deeper concerns about Apple’s decision to purge entire categories of apps because it doesn’t think they belong in its store. Lazer-Walker believes that games should be allowed to complete, and that they can still be of value rather than a service. Kabwe expressed a similar thought, pointing out that you can still buy console games from the 2000s. In other words: Apple removing these apps is a bit like removing movies from the iTunes Store, only because they appear as black bars on modern TVs (though I know it’s easier to interpret the video signal than to run code).
Sometimes the software is already done. I know the world expects to grow, change and improve forever (for free), but sometimes software is done and released and that’s where the story ends.
“Old” and “Stable” are not fault states. On the contrary – they indicate success. https://t.co/ELEzf1jjOj
— Arclight (@arclight) April 24, 2022
As some developers have pointed out, Apple’s explanation does make it clear why it appears to be applying the rules inconsistently. E.g, A developer pointed out That pocket godA game that was popular in the early days of the iPhone, it hasn’t been updated for seven years, but it’s still on the App Store. Apple is basically saying it’s still going up because it’s still popular.
From one point of view, this reasoning doesn’t necessarily align with the first half of Apple’s post, which says removing old apps is to ensure “user trust in quality apps” and to improve discoverability, security and privacy and user experience. After all – if an app has problems because it’s outdated, more downloads can make a bad app a bigger problem. Who gets hurt if there is an outdated app that hardly anyone downloads?
But Apple says it doesn’t want the App Store to be flooded with apps that both developers and users forget. It has enough problems to make it easy for users to find good apps, and it’s easy to imagine that Apple thought removing old, seemingly unrelated apps was a good solution.
While Apple’s post may feel like a slap in the face to developers worried about losing something they’ve spent their real time and energy on, the company is extending a small olive branch. Its post states that anyone who gets notifications from here — and those who have already — will have 90 days instead of 30 days to update their app before it gets deleted. While this should make it easier for developers to save their applications, it doesn’t make programs “exist as finished objects,” as Lazer-Walker puts it. Apple seems to be only interested in completed objects that are still attracting attention.