[Gareth321]

I am convinced this is by design. Apple has leaned heavily into service based revenue. This means recurring revenue. So in their App Store, they heavily incentivise subscriptions over one-time purchases. One of their tools is frequent and rapid API deprecation. This breaks older apps which aren't maintained. Developers must therefore spend much more effort on maintaining software on iOS and macOS (I can still run software on Windows from 20 years ago). This makes the value proposition of selling one-time purchase software poorer. It also means that older software has a much shorter lifespan, so users are forced to purchase software more frequently. I think this is one of the reasons revenue on iOS is so much higher than Android.

[jonplackett]

Which IMHO has made the AppStore a cesspool of awfulness.

Buying a one time app for a few quid used to be a normal and a good deal all round (I say this as a customer and iOS developer)

But now EVERYTHING is a monthly subscription. Even for apps that really shouldn’t need any updates - but like you say, they do need constant updates just to remain functions.

It’s created a broken AppStore and I just never pay for anything anymore.

[amelius]

Ripe for disruption ...

[jonplackett]

I’m in the UK and it’s looking from the rumours 3rd part AppStore’s are gonna be EU only so we’ll be missing out.

Another fabulous consequence of brexit.

[jstarfish]

> This breaks older apps which aren't maintained.

This does suck when you find an "old" app that works well, but there is an upside-- the 99% of other garbage apps from 15+ years ago don't pollute ongoing search results forever. Eventually, old apps that aren't maintained get popped from the stack.

The other upside is that new developers don't have to compete with ghost apps from the past continuing to leech new interest because they're ranked higher due to cumulative downloads over time. Nobody can compete with Time.

As an example of an app store that doesn't do this-- I don't know if ticalc.org is still around or still works this way, but their catalog grew endlessly with every generation of bored students uploading new redundant renditions of Drugwars (et al.). If you want to play Drugwars, which of the 500 versions of it are the best? Maybe the 1998 version is the best, or maybe the 2020 version is-- who can tell?

It made it very difficult to figure out what to bother with unless you were using a brand new TI-83+++ Extended APU Platinum Edition with bespoke hardware specs that forced a new backwards-incompatible platform category that instantly excluded all the old cruft.

[andromeduck]

Isn't that what metrics like DAU is meant to capture?

Making DAU & avg active time per day in addition to user reviews/ratings would be a pretty strong signal.

[hamilyon2]

I really like how impartial and matter-of-factly your comment is in contrast with dystopian picture it paints. Or maybe there are positive aspects of this process that I don't see?