If you write a book, it lives forever.

If you write an iPhone game, it exists until you stop updating it?

Remember my game Blip Arcade? (that’s ok, I barely do either)

It’s no longer purchasable because Apple removed it.  The reason: “We noticed that your app has not been updated in a significant amount of time”.

I’m not the only one either, Jayenkia posted about the same issue a few days ago, if you click below you can see some discussion about it:

#Dislike pic.twitter.com/S1LlMMCKOG

— Spike's Dislikes (@SpikesDislikes) September 8, 2018

It gets worse

Being delisted is one thing, but another worry is platform death.  

<raises a glass to the following dead platforms I’ve released software on>

Worldgroup/MBBS, WebOS, Blackberry 10, BREW, Tapwave Zodiac, Zeebo

Some of these can be emulated but newer platforms are increasingly relying on cloud services  to do anything, backends that get shut down without ever being publicly documented.

Good luck, emulator writers and software archivists, we’re counting on you.

I’m doing my part gif

In some cases we developers can help out by releasing legal free versions (sans DRM of course) of old stuff that is no longer commercially relevant.

Source code too, when the situation permits.  I just need to get around to doing that with my old stuff before it’s lost to the ravages of bad sectors…

To that end, I shall be making another old game of mine free tomorrow as well as open-sourcing it…!