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> The chase for subscription revenue is destroying a lot of potentially-great software. Phone OSes aren't nearly as well-optimized for backwards compatibility. Speaking as someone who works in this field, your phone app is almost never "done." Once you hit publish, you're signing up to continue providing updates for the life of the product. I've got binaries from the 90's that will run on Windows 11, no issues. But apps? Forget it, we just had to publish an update to a racing application for Android for literally no other reason than the binary was old and google said so, or we'd lose our Play store listing until we did. And in the process of doing that, while changing basically nothing you actually use as a user of that app, we had to update several permissions-seeking dialogs to be compatible with newer versions of Android, along with some changes to how we share files. You might notice the second one if you look hard. That took one of our developers about 4 days of work, and a fair amount of testing after that. Like, you can hate the game, I certainly do, but the way both Apple and Google go about arbitrarily changing and updating the OS, you just have to update your apps, which takes labor and time. And we have no mechanism to gate updates behind price tags. So like, I get the frustration, I really do and I share it a lot of the time. But I also understand the economics at play here and I won't ask someone to work for free for me. |
As for the, “binary too old” thing on the Play store that could be a low effort way of weeding out apps with security vulnerabilities due to old dependencies. There isn’t really an equivalent on Windows for this because it doesn’t have any kind of centralized, hosted app management (at least that people actually use). It’s not uncommon for maintainers of Linux package manager repos to remove “abandoned” (as in hasn’t received any updates in X time) packages for similar reasons, leaving users who want them to source them elsewhere.