This is an extremely valid thing to bring up... It is a bit questionable this approach, as
@CarlJ mentioned above, some of these games and IAPs are very pricey (and I am all for paying for a good bit of software, don't get me wrong).
But, what happens if I am a user that isn't aware of 32/64bit and iOS 11's dropping support, I buy a game and IAPs the day before? At the moment, it would be useless overnight, and I'd have no idea why, and be at the behest of a (
potentially non-existent) developer.
To follow up a bit, it turns out Slitherine confirmed last Sunday (
Slitherine Forums - Will iOS 64 Bit Support come for iOS 11?) that they're not going to update a whole slew of their games for iOS 11, which are thus going to stop functioning permanently in a few months. Here's what's going to break, according to that Slitherine post (nearly half of their iOS apps, and they didn't specifically name the rest as definitely safe, they simply listed these as doomed):
I've purchased about half of those, along with a number of IAPs (additional campaigns, not bags of coins), and it looks like I'll be out close to $150. You know, if I want to run what will then be the current iOS on my iPad. Their commentary entirely passes the buck to Apple, while basically making it clear that it would be highly inconvenient to fix the apps (some they just can't - okay, fine - while others "would take weeks" to fix - well,
they elected to sell high-priced premium apps on iOS, and Apple has a well-known history of necessitating software upgrades, and Slitherine already has my money). (Separate to this, the games, particularly the first 3 listed, are very highly regarded strategy games.)
And yeah, a further outrage is that the descriptions for these apps on the App Store
DO NOT start off with "
THIS WILL COMPLETELY STOP WORKING IF YOU UPGRADE TO IOS11 AND WE ARE NEVER GOING TO FIX IT." A message similar to that should be at the top of the app descriptions, and overlaid on the first screenshot to let people know what they are buying. But there's no hint there as to what will happen soon. As it is, you could easily spend $100 today, in good faith, on their games and IAP only to have it all crash and burn two and a half months from now.
I'd like to see Apple add a bright colorful un-missable warning flag next to the "Buy" button on 32-bit-only apps in the store -
right now - that says, "Note, this app has not been updated for iOS 11 (click here to learn how this may affect you)". Add a flag in the App Store dashboard for developers, where they can click a checkbox to say, "I commit to getting this app working at 64 bit by (say) December 1st" (to give them
lots of leeway). If they check this box, the "this app has not been modified" text is changed to note the developer's intent. Then make it
really easy for folks to get a refund, after December 1st (maybe I'm being too lenient with that date), if the app has not been updated to 64 bits and successfully resubmitted (like, the user clicks I have a problem, and clicks "yep, it's still not 64 bit, won't run", and gets a no-further-questions refund).
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You may want to check out the Slitherine forums, as there is currently a debate on this issue under the thread "Will iOS 64 Bit Support come for iOS 11?" in the General Discussion section. ...
The problem seems to be with the "engines" they were built around. In order to get them to run on 64-bit iOS, they would require a complete rewrite of their complex base software. This would take months to do, and would take funds away from the other projects the company was working on (remember that most of this firm's income comes from the PC market, and the iOS games were a niche of what is already a gaming niche.) And this is just for the games they developed "in-house.
I ran across that thread last night, actually. Agreed that with games that come from 3rd party developers there may not a lot they can do. Many of the games, though, are in-house, and some likely share a lot of commonality in their engines. But, quoting one of the Slitherine employees in the thread:
"As we've said in the past, the changes are quite involved for STUB, which would basically mean putting all the other projects that the internal programming team is working on currently on hold for weeks (if not longer) to update the code, add conversion to allow old saves and MP games to correctly run, rebuild all the other SKUs (so for all the games we are looking at more than a dozen different builds) and then test all the cross-play between the versions (e.g. for BA1 there are 5 SKUs, all needing MP testing against each other. That is 10 different combos just for that one game)."
So,
weeks to get the most important games from the list updated, not months. When you're selling a 99 cent app, there's some leeway for, "can't afford to update it". But when you're selling a $20 app with upwards of $60 of IAP for additional campaigns and such, this sounds a lot like "it would be inconvenient for us to do the right thing". They could take the route of putting out new versions that dropped a lot of the things mentioned in the thread - conversions for save games, ability to run user mods, cross-platform play, etc. - it would still be a lot better for their existing users than just having
nothing left. iOS has always been a moving target for developers. This is well known. They chose to make and sell premium-priced apps on iOS. Now they're abandoning their users because the iOS target moved, and they're trying to redirect all of the anger at Apple.
