Apple to developers: if we deleted your old app, it deserved it

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Several developers complained about how Apple threatened to remove their apps from the App Store because they hadn't been updated in a significant amount of time.

The notice was released on Friday evening.

As part of the App Store Improvements process, developers of apps that have not been updated within the last three years and fail to meet a minimal download threshold — meaning the app has not been downloaded at all or extremely few times during a rolling 12 month period — receive an email notifying them that their app has been identified for possible removal from the App Store.

We had heard about those emails before last week, when developers like Robert Kabwe and Emilia Lazer-Walker reported that they had 30 days to update their apps or they would be removed from the store. The policy and the amount of time given to make changes were unfair to independent developers according to other developers.

They were worried that Apple was going to wipe away an entire class of apps because they didn't belong in its store. Lazer-Walker believes that games can still be valuable without being a service. You can still buy console games from the 2000s, according to Kabwe. The argument is that Apple removing these apps is similar to removing movies from the iTunes Store because they show up with black bars on TVs.

Sometimes software is done. I know the World expects growth and change and improvement forever (for free) but sometimes the software is done and it ships and that's the end of the story.



'Old' and 'stable' are not failure states. On the contrary -- they indicate success. https://t.co/ELEzf1jjOj

— arclight (@arclight) April 24, 2022

Apple's explanation shows why it seemed to apply the rules in different ways. Pocket God, a popular game from the early days of the iPhone, hasn't been updated in seven years, but is still on the App Store. Apple is saying that it is still popular.

This reasoning doesn't jive with the first half of Apple's post, where it says it removes old apps to ensure user trust in quality apps and to improve discoverability. If an app is problematic because it's outdated, more downloads would make it worse. Who is at risk if no one downloads an outdated app?

Apple doesn't want the App Store to be cluttered with apps that both developers and users have forgotten about. It has enough problems making it easy for users to find good apps, and it's easy to imagine Apple thinking of removing old, seemingly irrelevant apps as a solution.

While Apple's post may feel like a slap in the face to developers worried about losing something that they spent genuine time and effort on, the company is extending a tiny olive branch. The post says that anyone who receives a notice from here will have 90 days to update their app before it is removed. Lazer-Walker said that it doesn't let the programsexist as completed objects, which should make it easier for developers to save their apps. The completed objects that are still getting eyeballs are what Apple is interested in.