i have recently been staggered with just how much iOS software is inaccessible, haphazardly (or not at all) preserved, etc. if you thought j2me and older phone software preservation was bad, my god iOS is next level. there are already countless deprecated apps, there are no emulation tools, and any future emulation attempt is going to have to grapple with the numerous OS and hardware updates, with some apps only working in a narrow band of OS revisions and hardware specs.
just wanna talk about this. maybe i’m overreacting? maybe it’s not so bad?
yeah even from a position of never actually looking into this and only playing a handful of ios games a year my phone is a complete graveyard, it’s very clearly fucked
Yup, their walled garden approach, their complete indifference to whether their updates break software, and their devotion to an extremely fast cycle of planned hardware obsolescence creates a situation that is a complete nightmare for preservation.
ive noticed people cant even remember the games from like 5, 8, 10 years ago that they WANT to preserve either. no one prepared for everything going away
it’s really more this than the other two (the other two aren’t totally accurate), and to the extent that it is this, it’s not just indifference. apple flat out doesn’t want their users to be able to run software that isn’t currently maintained, which does have protectionist economic incentives aligned with it, and makes some sense for maintaining a premium work platform but none at all for games
the 64-bit restriction would be entirely defensible if not for the concurrent addition of onerous notarization requirements, the ongoing feud with nvidia/vulkan, and the still missing arm migration that theoretically justifies it
basically I wish they felt like they had to actually earn goodwill for this shit because I can live with civ 4 and ut2k4 no longer running on my second computer that I only use for work (or streaming from my other computer) but I am a special boy and all the rest of that is pretty lousy
It’s a constantly moving target, and many developers just don’t have the resources (nor is it monetarily viable) to keep them running. I worked on a couple smaller iOS apps professionally like 6-8ish? years ago and literally every release would have pretty large breaking changes.
Xcode was maybe the buggiest IDE I’d ever worked with, too. And instead of fixing the problems with it, they’d just strap on more wizards and layers to try to “simplify” it. In the span of a year the process to make a release build had almost changed entirely. Options would move around, get shuffled, automated. It was exhausting to keep up with it.
Yeah I don’t want to derail this thread too much with Mac stuff because nobody cares about the Mac but this is a separate issue, but definitely one that needs more attention than developers throwing a fit because they’re used to Windows where technical debt doesn’t really exist by design, at the cost of being a stagnant shitshow of a platform
But that exists on the backs of Microsoft engineers that DO do a ton of engineering work to keep everything backwards compatible. The tradeoff is a big company solving a very hard problem vs. spreading the problem around to a ton of smaller developers who have to solve a bunch of smaller problems.
yeah, Apple’s model is basically “incentivize becoming the platonic ideal of a forward-thinking small business then we’ll feature you on our store,” it’s extremely hostile to independent artists and people who have better things to do than jump through those hoops
I did think it was incredibly cool that the first generation of the windows linux subsystem actually made binary compatibility just work but then they couldn’t fix the bottlenecks in storage speed that introduced and they just decided to scrap it for a docker-based solution after a couple years and they still can’t ship a terminal that has feature parity with like, nextstep’s to save their life because no one actually uses that platform for technical work that isn’t enterprise or gamedev related so oopsie
I’m not minimizing the effort, and I even agree that it was the correct business decision for Microsoft at the time to push so heavily toward backward compatibility because of how much of their business revolved around selling enterprise volume licenses of OS upgrades. It’s a hard sell if an upgrade costs you as much in upkeep and development to your internal apps as it does to buy the upgrade itself.
As a developer in the workplace, I have never seen less enthusiasm for new technology than I have in people who work atop Microsoft platforms because they have been conditioned to never adopt new technologies unless they are forced to, and they will never be forced to by design because all new technologies are additions, not replacements. If I boot up Visual Studio right now and look at the New Project dialog box, the majority of templates presented to me in that dialog are for obsolete technologies that are in maintenance mode indefinitely, and no mention of this is made anywhere in the UI. The platform just ends up feeling boring and stagnant.
Contrast that with what I know of Apple-exclusive development where developers for the platform are also enthusiastic users of the platform, and they are excited to adopt the newest technologies because they want their apps to take full advantage of the platform. Because nothing outdated sticks around for too long, good Mac and iOS software feel like pieces of a coherent system with shared design goals and values. That couldn’t be further from the case on Windows, where everything feels like it is a different exhibit in a museum of Microsoft software stacks over the last 27 years.
That is where I’m coming from as (currently) a developer of Web-based e-commerce and logistics software and it’s also informed by the 6 years I spent as an indie iOS developer at the start of the last decade.