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Continuity plans for apps
I hate to say it, but it’s not impossible for a single-person app manufacturer to die. There may be some deaths among the people that make our apps, and if it’s just one person, the app will disappear after a while.
Do app manufacturers of the singleton sort have any way of “handing over” a project to others in case they do die, so that the app itself continues to live in the app store?
It’s one of the differences with hardware, the person who created a hardware synth might die but the synth itself continues to work and be buy/sell-able long after. A thing on the app store just terminates if the Apple account stops financial upkeep (I believe).
This applies to apps and web apps beyond the music making sphere, too. I wonder what “off the shelf” continuity structures there might already be for such eventualities, and whether they should be worked on now.
Comments
Well, this is hard to solve for devs and easy to solve for Apple, so that's who you should be talking to
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Priorities? My business has gone from earning me a reasonable living to zero! I run a guest house with my wife and we are looking at no income for the foreseeable future. The loss of an app is the last thing on my mind at present.
That's terrible, I hope things get better for you. But I think the OPs post raises a valid question. Good luck though!
@ajmiller these are very tough times. Sorry to hear about the hit to your business.
@u0421793 i have asked this before on this forum as well. Not only when a developer ‘goes off grid’ but if they just can’t continue to support the app anymore. It would be great to have a handover system where someone else could continue to support it.
@gusgranite thanks.
priorities...
Don't forget the apps (or app?) still in development that haven't been released yet. How to continue their development?
Indeed, this is very relevant to the situation just reported that all the ppg apps have been pulled from the App Store after Wolfgang Palm's sudden retirement, and are looking unlikely to be brought back.
Wow, quite the thread. I’m hopeful our compatriots, the small devs, can weather the storms of this tough market (even more tough). It’s tough on small business right now.
All the best @ajmiller.
Forget the virus, we are going to see a lot of things (apps included) disappear in the unprecedented economic crisis that follows...
This reminds me of that time I was waiting for the next Hendrix album.
Then I started learning everything I could about SRV's guitar style of play.
And I really got into the the vocal stylings of Kurt Cobain but I needed some more examples.
I was all set to go see Michael Jackson live and figure out how to move.
But for the complete package I want see Prince live.
I'm now convinced I need to sit at the feet of @u0421793 just for general view on how to
worry about personal loss. He's a master at corner case risk management.
Well, risk management is one of the things I used to teach when I was lecturing, but business continuity is something most businesses have to engage with anyway. Smaller businesses tend not to, for obvious reasons (it’s a core competency of itself, takes time and expertise, isn’t the actual making of the product).
Most of the things we’re used to are in danger, in my opinion, mainly because of complexity. If something can be handed over to someone else, they have to understand it. If nobody understands it, that jeopardises the continuity of the thing. As technology gets cleverer and more convoluted, and people have been following this complexity in their normal pursuits of their career, the assumption is that others can understand the platforms and frameworks of technology. However, if there’s a drastic break, and others have to step in, cold, and they simply cannot understand it, that’s a severe hindrance.
If everything is documented adequately, this effect can be mitigated to some extent. If technologies and frameworks are built and created so as to be easier to comprehend (and correspondingly, less likely to be misinterpreted or incorrectly understood) then there’s greater chance of surviving a break in knowledge. As an extreme example, imagine a break of three generations before anyone returns to anything technical. Would some parts of civilisation remain completely occluded and mysterious because literally nobody understands it?
Apple should keep apps available to those who purchased them. It's not like people can backup installers. Effectively apps are not on a perpetual license, once they dissappear from the store they die along with peoples devices.
Maybe that sounds entitled, but how much would it really cost to keep those on the servers?
Cake or death?
I agree. It’s hardly a loss of earnings to them and doesn’t really threaten an opportunity to sell further. It’s more or less not much of a cost at all for Apple to keep an app available, other than for maintenance and security reasons (vulnerabilities that arise later but can’t be patched). It’d be visible as a service provision cost if most of the App Store were ‘dead’ apps, though. Run the App Store concept forward about 50 years, you wouldn’t want it cluttered up with 50 year old apps that have limited contemporary relevance. It’s a problem, which needs balance.
Comparing software to hardware is a fool's errand. If you want it to be so, dedicate a hardware device to your beloved software and don't update it. Easy as that.
Perhaps it might help to think of digital media as a particularly plastic, and impermanent medium (obviously everything is impermanent, but it's hard to see it that way when some objects and structures decay more slowly than humans do).
Imagine digital media as a service more than a thing. More akin to a meal or a massage than a chair or a house. The prices of apps seem to reflect this.
The expectation that one should continue to get updates indefinitely after paying a few dollars (often for years of work, mind you!) is a pretty good example of entitlement.
Have I been burned from apps that have been abandoned? yes! I've been left in a lurch before. Do I expect that the development of a niche app to continue beyond expiry? of course not.
If we as a species can survive a handful of decades into the future, we might just see the continuity of developers', artists', chefs', film directors' works after their retirements thanks to advancements in AI, but I find the expectation of perpetuity to be pretty ding dang dopey. everything runs its course. deal with it.
Cost about 60-80 units of currency for a used iPad mini 2/Air 1 which can be frozen in time by tapping “remind me later” forever.
I’m running an iPad mini 2 on iOS 10.3 with ancient apps for a long time and without issues.
Bonus of having a frozen device or two is the ability run several instances of apps that are in the “dead because not AU” category that somehow appeared!
By and large Apple does keep them available to those that purchased them even after they are removed from the store. There are exceptions though.
I thought its anyway all obsolete for you.
That's good to know, I'm generally a bit pessimistic unless I see some notice to the contrary.
I wouldn't be expecting anyone to keep up with fixes dealing with OS updates indefinitely. People got a right to move on, retire, die... Wouldn't be right to dig up some poor old dev and reanimate them for a few bug fixes.
I could be wrong, but I think whether or not the app remains available depends on whether the developer continues to pay their yearly account fee. I think if that lapses then the apps are no longer available even in people's purchased apps. We've seen this happen temporarily and then be rectified, and also permanently.
iMazing allows you to download them.
I wouldn’t rely on Apple if an app has disappeared from the store.
Alchemy Pro is usually available to reinstall but that isn’t consistent.
Safer to delete recently released apps if you need extra space on device.