[on_and_off]

> for everyone / my next app is an interior design / home control app.

That's a good point but really not "for everyone". Agreed that for a one shot app like this, pay once is the model that works. Although one could argue that you still held the customer data captive as soon as they get a new phone and the app is no longer compatible.

[wilshipley]

Sorry, “for everyone” was intended to mean, “the flaws I’ve identified hurt Apple, some customers, and some developers” not “100% of customers are hurt by the flaws.”

—

I’ve spoken with an Apple SVP about the compatibility issue and it's huge, you’re right. My suggestion to them at the time was to boot apps out of the app store that don’t stay up-to-date.

But there’s a gap I can’t solve, which is Apple doesn’t want users paying more just to keep their apps running on new iPhones.

As a datapoint, though, iOS apps have a LONG shelf-life. I have an iOS app I shipped with iOS 7 and it still runs on iOS 13.

With macOS, yes, we’re all angry because Apple finally made good on its promise to deprecate 32-bit apps after like six years of warning us. And, yah, I lost 60% of my games on Steam and I’m upset about it, but also I like my machine being way more responsive (loading both the entire 32-bit stack and the entire 64-bit stack at once meant a ton of memory pressure and swapping), and I like that Apple doesn’t have to maintain to entirely different codebases and can fix bugs and add features once not twice.

And it’s not like 64-bit apps are a new thing — if you’ve submitted an app to the Mac App Store you’ve been required for YEARS to have it run on 64-bit machines.

It sucks that Steam didn’t enforce this as well — not because they should do Apple’s bidding, but because it would have been a mitzvah to Steam’s customers who just lost a lot of games.

-Wil

[on_and_off]

I think we agree :) More to the point I believe that both models are necessary in a perfect world .. but not sure they will happen.

I too also have way too many mac steam games ... from the very brief period when gaming on a mac was thing. I haven't updated my personal MBP yet but I will have to bite the bullet sooner or later.

Fortunately I have moved on to consoles.. I better not update my mbp and look at my list of compatible games.

There could be another way though, looks like windows 10 still supports 32 bits software via WOW64 (32 bits emulator). In general the one good thing I can say about windows is that it managed to stay retro compatible with pretty much all the previous versions.