[johnwalkr]

This reminded me of the fact that excellent remasters of monkey island were released on the iPhone (and a few other paltforms) but were removed from the App Store after a few years. It’s a shame, they had great new artwork and sound/music but you could switch back and forth with the old art and it was cool to see the difference in each scene.

[eps]

Disney yanked them after acquiring LucasArts.

I was so pissed when I went to re-download them and they disappeared even from my Purchased list. Complained to Apple and they basically said "shouda made backups, good bye and fuck off". $12 down the drain.

[goosedragons]

They still sell the enhanced editions on PC and Xbox (even works on One and Series X|S). Probably still PS3 too. They probably couldn't be bothered to update it to 64 bit on iOS.

[musicale]

Apple's 32-bit apocalypse killed so many games on both iOS and macOS.

[musicale]

The stupid bit is that iOS "backups" don't actually include your apps.

There really should be a "full backup" option.

[CharlesW]

Sadly, the developer never updated them for compatibility with 64-bit-only versions of iOS (iOS 11+).

[DennisL123]

Happy to sign all the necessary NDAs and to port them to 64 bit, newer iOS versions and devices for free.

[smoldesu]

If they got depreciated once, it's gonna happen again. Apple should invest in Microsoft-tier backwards compatibility if they want to avoid publishers abandoning their software.

[turquoisevar]

God no.

As an end user it’s already annoying how, mainly big devs, are extremely slow in adopting the latest APIs, this would only motivate them more to just sit on their laurels.

As a dev for Apple platforms it would become a buggy mess and would lead to less bumping of target OS versions, which in turn leads to needing to reinvent wheels and coming up with time consuming workarounds.

Just one look at the gazillion ways Windows 11 has implemented configuration apps, from as far back as the XP era, has me shudder. You start out with Win 11 stuff but oh, you want to use that one thing? Now you’re lopped into Windows 7 stuff oh you want this other thing, enjoy this XP app, etc, etc. All in the name of backwards compatibility, no thank you.

Hell, the fact that they had to skip Windows 9 because of so many devs checking for a 9 to detect 95/98 is another such messy nonsense.

If I had to choose between that experience or Apple forcing me every year to learn an entirely new programming language + UI framework + persistent storage framework I’ll happily become a polyglot because the MS way of doing things is ridiculous.

[andybak]

Software shouldn't stop working. Unique and amazing things whither and die. That feels wrong to me.

(Of course the problem is that it's damn hard to run old versions of iOS under emulation. That's the solution that would appease me)

[turquoisevar]

The older versions are surprisingly emulatabe; there's just not that much interest in packaging it in a way that is accessible for the average user.

[giancarlostoro]

What I really dont get is why in some cases, when it looks obvious to me that the XP UI is just some Microsoft GUI for the drivers, why Microsoft didn't consolidate those APIs into the modern UI. They own the entire run-time, I don't understand why they cannot add a translation layer.

[tadfisher]

XP? They still have the NT 3.5 UI if you dig deep enough. Translating these is just asking for trouble when an important checkbox moves out of the frame because the original dev, in 1993, placed it with absolute coordinates. And there's no way in hell MS has access to all of these vintage drivers.

[turquoisevar]

It beats me; as you said, it would take relatively modest efforts to add a translation layer.

Especially considering that most of it already is a translation layer for the Windows Registry.

[incrudible]

Most software is written for ten year business cycles. Maybe the Apple approach makes sense for most consumers and the few little apps they use, but there's reasons why Microsoft is so strong in the enterprise, and backwards compatibility is a huge part of that.

[turquoisevar]

I’d say that more and more are moving to SaaS and/or platform-agnostic web-based stuff (even if it just runs on an on-prem server).

But you’re right in that a lot of enterprise software is/was written with ten years or more in mind.

Having seen it in action, I wonder if that’s the right course of action just in terms of security and what passed as acceptable UI alone, but I suppose that’s a topic for another time. For most enterprises, it’s a cost consideration where there’s a high tolerance for crap as long as it means that it saves money.

While Apple is nowhere near as uncommon in the enterprise world as it used to be, it’s no secret that enterprise is far down Apple’s priority list. Backward compatibility (or rather lack of motivation to facilitate that) might very well be a factor in that, but it seems to be more a matter of not needing to tap into that market.

[dwaite]

I suspect Apple considers developers ignoring a five(?) year notice period that 32 bit compatibility will be dropped a sign that the publisher has already abandoned their software.

[incrudible]

A "notice" doesn't pay bills. If the cost of porting over is expected to exceed future revenue, the publisher can not be expected to foot the bill.

[_pigpen__]

Moreover, for a quoted company, Sarbanes Oxley makes it difficult to spend money on this kind of activity.

[andybak]

"Abandoned"? Is that another word for "finished"?

[judge2020]

Expecting old software to be backwards compatible forever is unrealistic. Even modern 64-bit Windows doesn't support 16 bit applications, and the only reason this isn't a problem is because of how long ago they were of any importance.

Old software still lives on in emulation and old hardware. If a developer doesn't feel the need to keep it updated for new hardware, it can join the outdated hardware it was made for in the archive.

[FirmwareBurner]

That was never Apple's thing. Apple always changes things as it pleases and expects the developers to suck it up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

[turquoisevar]

Not sure if you linked the wrong video, but the one you linked to barely supports your comment.

Setting aside that abandoning OpenDoc turned out to be the right call, I see a dude trying to get a rise out of Jobs and Jobs handling it in a very respectful way, going as far as admitting they make mistakes and that he is flawed, but that ultimately the decisions are made with the end user (and sales) in mind and less with what kind of nifty technology is behind it.

Specifically on the matter of 32-bit support, not dropping it would’ve meant not being able to make the leaps forward that they were able to make, which led to a better user experience.

From the developer side of things, as a developer for Apple platforms, it’s a silly discussion to begin with because in 99% of the cases it just meant recompiling it against the latest SDK.

So I have no lost love for devs that couldn’t be arsed, even ignoring the fact that the entire ecosystem is known for rapid improvements and continuous maintenance. In fact that’s what most indie devs love about it.

[devbent]

> So I have no lost love for devs that couldn’t be arsed,

How are teams that no longer exist supposed to recompile anything? Plenty of source is laying around where the last person who knew how to compile it left the company years ago and no one even knows how to check the software out from the source repo anymore.

(Pre Git, it wasn't always obvious how to even pull software down from repos, tools like perforce allow for fancy remapping of folders so you cannot necessarily just pull source down, also I've worked in repos where you needed specially modified scripts that weren't in the repo so you could actually build things!)

Microsoft's MO has been that once the end user has acquired an executable, that program will keep working damn nearly forever.

16bit support was the only time they ever dropped anything, and people are still upset about that.

[incrudible]

> just recompile it bro

This assumes you have all the source code for everything available, the person to do it ready, and that no compiler errors anywhere have crept in through the many revisions of the SDK. None of these assumptions hold for iOS ports that sold poorly (as most did), that were done by some team (likely defunct) as a one-off, that probably used a bunch of middleware they didn't own. It's just not worth it, otherwise it would've happened.

[smoldesu]

Maybe they should look into it then, asking developers if you can update their codebase on HN probably won't help users very much.

[ndiddy]

This is an example of the value provided by ScummVM, it means that fans are able to keep playing the games without having to deal with rightsholders who don’t want to maintain them.