My account got closed for inactivity while I had multiple apps published. Google does not understand the concept of a finished app apparently, and requires you to continuously push updates or else you permanently lose your account with no way of reopening it.
I do like the concept that developers need to put in some effort to keep the app in the app store. Otherwise there'll be millions of orphaned apps and thousands with duplicate functionality.
By mandating a yearly effort the number of apps will fall through attrition and your app stands a bigger chance to get noticed.
You're right that a policy like this favors newcomers. Buy why is being "old" and/or "done" seen as bad in software? We need more developers to embrace "done" and stop changing software for the sake of changing it. Most of the software I use, I like just the way it is. I don't want more features. I don't want the UI to change (again). I don't want AI and chat in them. I don't want to have to upgrade my operating system just to keep using them.
they aren't asking to make changes. It is android is constantly evolving so basically their 'hope' is every app developer will rebuild with latest android and test on a modern device and proactively fix or remove an app if it doesn't. Plenty of apps crash on startup and not a great user experience to be the consumer that finds the crash so pushing it back to dev to do this yearly is a reasonable expectation.
I don't think it's reasonable to change an OS in such a way that apps which did not previously crash on startup now crash on startup. Unless there is some huge change, like moving from one CPU architecture to another, apps should not even have to be rebuilt, let alone modified, just to keep working year after year.
>Unless there is some huge change, like moving from one CPU architecture to another, apps should not even have to be rebuilt, let alone modified, just to keep working year after year.
And, as history teaches us[0], not necessarily even then.
bramhaag · · focus · HN ↗
hn_submit · · focus · HN ↗
By mandating a yearly effort the number of apps will fall through attrition and your app stands a bigger chance to get noticed.
ryandrake · · focus · HN ↗
clifdweller · · focus · HN ↗
ryandrake · · focus · HN ↗
nobody9999 · · focus · HN ↗
And, as history teaches us[0], not necessarily even then.
[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-code_machine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-code_machine