arthurba

The author is naive to say "This would certainly pull a small amount of resources away from other projects as the developer says."

I don't know what toolchain this developer is using, but here is what I know about Xcode.

The latest Xcode won't even open a 7 year old xcode project, and if you have a VM with the old macOS and the old Xcode then it won't connect to Apple to upload or sign it. 

Maybe if you upgrade the app each year with each new Xcode it's easier, but in my experience, apps older than 3-5 years need a total rewrite.  I also see this on the App Store, apps I use often seem to get a "rewrite" about every 3 years and no longer than every 5 years.

From my perspective it's much easier to develop for windows desktops where the visual studio 2022 will happily open and compile a 20 year old Visual C 6 project, or develop for Linux servers where the latest gcc happily compiles 20 or 30 year old code.  Sure the resulting program may look "old" but it doesn't need a rewrite, it just needs small UI updates, which will only consume "a small amount of resources" from the development team.

I have sympathy for his argument for sure, but part of the reason why the iPhone is so "popular" (in the sense people get a new one every 3-5 years, and tend to stay in the ecosystem) is that it and its operating system iOS evolves fairly quickly over time.  If he'd developed the app for Windows Phone, the same would also be true - his app would be removed from the Windows App Store - not because his app is old, but because the Windows App Store, the Windows Phone and the entire ecosystem is no more, it's gone, it's kaput.

Sure in an ideal world Apple would enable long term code compatibility and keep up with modern trends, but they've made it clear that they don't think it's possible.  So we get incompatibility, lots of developer work to stay in the same spot, but an ecosystem that does actually still exist.  And just like OS9 emulators can run on macOS or even iPadOS today - maybe his old app will one day run in an iPhone 2017 emulator - gone but not forgotten.