iOS software preservation concerns

King of Posters
#28

It’s sad but like… the costs of maintaining a platform to keep everything running indefinitely are not worth the advantages unless your entire business depends on it. That only applies to Microsoft, and even then, no one has a contract with Microsoft guaranteeing that their focus on backward compatibility will continue indefinitely. All anyone has is faith based on 27 years of consistent behaviour.

There are some interesting developments on Catalina right now that have restored support for some apps that shouldn’t be working anymore and given the little I’ve looked at it, it’s possible some of this could be ported over to jailbroken iOS devices given the shared foundation? But there never really was much effort being poured into backward compatibility work in the scene while I was a part of it, and most of the brightest minds have left the scene, so there’s not too much hope there. The best you could hope for is some kind of translation layer that lets you run ARM builds of iOS apps on top of historical versions of Intel frameworks in the iOS Simulator, but then that would be with keyboard and mouse, and iOS SDK versions are only running on specific versions of the Mac OS too…

#29

i know this isn’t really the point but fwiw i have an iphone 4 with ziggurat on it, i can bring it to salt butt at least

4 Likes
#30

I know, I can’t help it

1 Like
#31

Who is going to be the Nightdive Studios of resurrecting mobile games

#32

yeah, i would love to play it again. that’d be much appreciated.

#33

of course, it doesn’t need to be in apple’s best interest for preservation to take place. but their specific position (walled garden, rapidly iterative hardware+OS, breaking older software frequently+permanently, no emulation) has made it difficult. e.g. video game companies didn’t necessarily do much to preserve stuff; it was pirates and archivists and people with other motivations, in many cases explicitly against the platform holders’ wishes. the best archives of iOS software are still piracy sites, but essentially no one has any way to run this deprecated software now. if apple doesn’t care (and as you pointed out, they are often incentivized specifically not to care) then it just straight up looks like we’re fucked for the foreseeable future. things are actively being lost.

and this is historically important software! incredibly historically important. i don’t believe the status quo is acceptable, but i don’t see any good solutions either.

1 Like
#34

I still have no idea what anyone means when they say “walled garden” if not “win32 x86 software is taken to be the entire universe of software and anything not designed for that platform is by its nature foreign.” I can run the software that’s important to me far more easily on mac than on windows! I can compile my own emulator builds for my iPhone!

lots of other good discussion itt but that phrase makes the vein in my forehead pop out

1 Like
#35

i don’t know what it means either, really. i don’t honestly know why this situation is so bad. the whole thing just feels like a disaster from a preservation perspective.

#36

yeah it definitely is but most of the factors at work there are not much better on android which has the same problems around a centralized distribution method for software that doesn’t really care about game preservation and is happy to dump stuff permanently when it’s no longer maintained and is quite difficult to emulate faithfully, android just has fewer unique games and less aggressive deprecation of its runtime environment in the event that a good pirate archive did exist

1 Like
#37

am i wrong in assuming android archivists have more options? aren’t there working emulators for android? and yeah, i tend to prioritize iOS because i think there’s a lot of unique & historically significant software on there compared to android, but i could definitely be wrong about that. both are very important to me

#38

I have no idea how I’d go about playing this again if I wanted to:

(it controls with the gyro)

1 Like
#39

Android has a bunch of preservation-friendly things surrounding it, like how most games are easily ported to PC, and the breadth of emulators. But yeah even with all that mobile is still a perpetually dying space. Doubly so since every company now operates on the GaaS model for their P2W city management sim whose design they copied from Civony.

1 Like
#40

You can run android code on PC with the right app, can’t you? I mean you could years ago, but it’s been a while.

#41

I used BlueStacks to play shit I didn’t want to use touch controls for

#42

Oh LOL wow they really went all in on the gaming angle since I last checked

#43

I’m the one who first brought up that phrase in this thread, and I was using it in the sense that iOS on an iPhone feels like it’s designed specifically to keep me from getting into the guts of my phone and doing anything beyond Apple’s relatively narrow window of intended use cases. Maybe there’s some arcane stuff you can do to get around that, but I’m not a software engineer.

1 Like
#44

I think that effect is more perceived than anything else, though it is obviously intentional. Windows/Android have always had a lot more opportunities to go futz with levers in the back room compared to Apple platforms which ask you: “are you a developer? if so, great, here’s all this stuff you can do. if not, do not do this.”

the thing is, the levers on the other platforms are arguably just as arcane and considerably more arbitrary; the binary is quite reasonable when it’s well-handled, though people whose primary use of computers is playing games on limited budgets are absolutely the least likely to agree.

#45

as a punter i appreciate the ‘walled garden’ in that it seems conducive to dominic cummings and joey incel not being able to read my messages but as a creative i wouldn’t touch the platform with a bargepole like

2 Likes
#46

The most memorable iOS game I ever played was Cave Rescue. I played through most of it in the dark after a hurricane caused an extended power outage in my city in 2012.

It’s not available officially anywhere anymore as far as I can tell. But fortunately there’s an Android version floating around.

2 Likes
#47

The only mobile game I really ever cared about was Cavesweeper, and that’s 32-bit :(. It’s sitting on my phone which only runs 64-bit apps. My old iPad would happily run it, but I have no way of transferring it to that.

1 Like