At the end of last week, the developer Protopop Games stated that Apple planned to remove his game, Motivationfrom being sold on his app store because he hadn’t updated it for over three years.
The email from Apple also said that Potopop could keep the game in the store by sending an update within 30 days. Apple’s support page confirms that this is part of a new policy to rate older apps.
Apple has begun evaluating apps it believes may be out of date. If those apps have any problems, the company will alert the developers in a similar way to how they informed Protopop. However, Apple will immediately remove older apps that crash on startup. After removal, users who have already downloaded an app can continue to use and re-download it. The removed apps will also remain in developer accounts so they can keep the app names.
I’m sitting here on a Friday night, working myself to bone after my day job, trying my best to scrape a living from my indie games, trying to keep up with Apple, Google, Unity, Xcode, MacOS changes that happen so fast my head spins while performing worse on older devices.
– Protopop Games (@protopop) April 23, 2022
However, updating old apps may not be easy or even possible for everyone. Protopop explained that updating Motivoto to the latest version of the Unity engine, rebuilding, testing and shipping will take a long time. Confusingly, Apple didn’t tell the app maker if there was a glitch with the game, which could have saved time during testing. In response to Protopop’s tweet, one developer said they spent weeks rebuilding multiple games that were removed from the list. In short, this is a real problem for indie developers who would see the cancellation of their games.
Source: Eurogamer
#Apple #removing #apps #havent #updated