[Pulcinella]

Yeah Apple’s approach to backwards compatibility is basically the opposite of Microsoft’s: treat software as a living thing that will need ongoing maintenance and upkeep; push developers forwards and push them towards this understanding; let them know apple will not put in Herculean effort to effort to keeping decades old software running.

This, of course, has huge drawbacks, but also huge benefits (e.g. developers adopt new APIs much faster which benefits the end user faster).

I do empathize with wanting old software and old hobby projects to just keep working (especially when Apple likes to advertise their products as “It just works.”) We all just want tog ER in with our lives.

One of the author’s tweets mentions further down that at least one of the games was written in Swift 1.0 or so and they never updated and recompile with later swift versions. That’s on them.

[Daedren]

>(e.g. developers adopt new APIs much faster which benefits the end user faster).

On the other hand, you have most iOS apps with a high iOS minimum requirement. The moment your device stops getting updates, you need a new one as your apps will, for the most part, cease getting updates.

On Android's end, as long as your device is on Lollipop and up, you shouldn't have issues. Android devs adopting new APIs.. Well, devs aren't as well behaved on this end (lol scoped storage) though Google's mandates recently have been pushing some things forward with its own demerits, it's wait and see.

>One of the author’s tweets mentions further down that at least one of the games was written in Swift 1.0 or so and they never updated and recompile with later swift versions. That’s on them.

You have no idea how much work and time it takes to migrate an app between Swift versions prior to 5.0

[Pulcinella]

I do actually. That’s why you don’t wait years until the last minute to do it. Also the breaking syntax changes between version really slowed down after the first few versions. Also also I would say it was unwise to build upon the first version of anything and expect it to work forever, especially when Apple was saying it was the first version and there will be changes.

[Daedren]

There's still a lot of entropy involved in forcing a new update, such as laptops possibly not supporting the new minimum macOS for Xcode, various frameworks which may have been deprecated, etc.

And when it comes to games? The game engines are big issues, which is why most games are just made and left to gather dust, because updating them can be a real herculean effort.

And asking people to take the effort without stating a reason? That's pretty harsh. At the very least make a public statement about it, and make it apply to everyone, so everyone's aware of what their time/money investment will amount to when making an app.

[noobermin]

> (e.g. developers adopt new APIs much faster which benefits the end user faster).

There is less than zero evidence this is true, if anything, it's the explanation for why devices in general get slower as time goes on even if someone doesn't download any new apps but does download regular updates.