What us at TouchArcade Towers have coined the ’32-bit Appocalypse’ has been a significant cause of much anxiety amongst both mobile gamers and developers on the App Store of late. While the lack of compatibility with 32-bit applications on iOS 11 strongly hints that such older games will likely meet a slow death once the new software update hits this Fall, there is still an atmosphere of unpredictability and confusion over what exactly will actually happen to the titles that Apple deems archaic in the near future. A report from IBTimes suggests that the Cupertino tech giants may be about to take a more proactive approach, as over the past few weeks 58,000 applications have been removed from the Chinese App Store – with approximately 20,000 of them being games.
While signs strongly point to this cull of 58,000 applications being related to this major App Store clean-up that Apple have repeatedly mentioned over the past few months, there may be other reasons behind the scale and regional basis of this removal. In their report, IBTimes cites a conflict between Apple and Tencent, the owners of Supercell and popular Chinese messaging app WeChat, and how this move may be the result of some fall-out between the two companies. However, both the scale and the nature of the titles removed – many were cited as ‘inferior apps’ that were not up to Apple’s standards, which is a rampant issue within the Chinese App Store – suggests that this may simply be the next step in Apple’s purification process of its platform. After all, the size and scale of this cull is truly unprecedented. Still, it’d be equally disheartening to see this move spread to Western App Stores, as to suddenly lose a number of truly classic games such as my beloved Dungeon Raid ($0.99) would break my heart.
