- I *PAID* hundred of apps. - They used to work fine. - Updates broke many of them. They don't work anymore. - These apps are still sold as "compatible with iOS3". It's a contract. They must respect their own words. - I *WASTED* hundreds of dollars. I wasted hours. Programmers are stealing people. - Programmers are selling non-working apps. That's a crime. Programmers know their apps crash; they all have been contacted. They just ignore us and f*ck us and steal us, on purpose. They continue to sell non-working apps. - Apple is selling these non-working apps. That's a crime. Chill out. Waste time. Waste money. Waste life. Should I commit suicide also ?
You lucky guy !! The forum's limit blocks me !! Thanks God !! I can't update anymore my first-post list... Too many crashing apps... But, but, but I still have HUNDRED apps to add to this list. I can't add them anymore, though. You lucky guy.
From an individual dev's perspective, you paid $1-$5. The fact that you spent hundreds of dollars on a bunch of other apps from other devs has nothing at all to do with your dealings with a single dev. So, you need to adjust your expectations with the knowledge that you are complaining about the loss of a cheap meal that likely happened years ago in each individual case. Yes, you should expect them to work, assuming Apple doesn't force the issue via forced progress or sloppy execution of their store regarding what their requirements say and what they actually do behind the scenes. This can be caused by several things. One, the dev made an honest mistake, and included something that wasn't compatible, and didn't have the test equipment, or didn't take the time to test on the older equipment. Two, the dev intended to up the minimum OS requirement, and forgot to. Three, Apple screwed up, and allowed an incompatible version to be upgraded on your device. Apple does not test on old OS's or devices, nor do they give devs any easy means to do so either. With an ever persistent push by Apple to keep moving forward, things do innocently fall between the cracks, and mistakes are made. No dev deliberately releases known incompatibilities. It doesn't make any sense from a business perspective, especially since shoppers can leave bad reviews. Then ask Apple for a refund. You can do that. There is a very simple process to state your case to Apple, and they will give you a refund if the app doesn't work on your device. It's always been there. Any single programmer did not steal hundreds of dollars from you. They made an error, and made your $1-$5 app not work anymore. Telling any single dev that you've wasted hundreds of dollars/hours and they owe you an immediate solution because you gave them a buck a few years back is more than a little strange. Yes, some devs may ignore you. Some may tease you. They are unprofessional. However, given how extreme your behavior has been in this thread, I'd hazard to guess your dealings with each developer have been less than cordial. When you're asking a dev to fix a bug that only affects a microscopic segment of their customers, you have to expect resistance. So your approach needs to be extra nice, as you're asking for something that doesn't benefit them very much, and could cost $100's in dev time and lost sales when the star rating resets. That's right, devs generally lose money when updates first hit, until they can build up enough star ratings again. So, companies big and small, there will be resistance to your requests, especially since you're talking about an OS from years ago, that Apple has chosen not to support anymore. Apple's review system should at least launch an app on the minimum OS listed, I agree. But they don't, and they won't. If an app stops working, that's what the refund/complaint option is for. We're on iOS 6 now, and the latest dev tools require devs to up the minimum to iOS 4.3 and drop support for all devices prior to the 3GS. So if a dev wants to support iOS 6 features, they will not be able to support iOS 3 at all, nor the devices that OS runs on. You're fighting a losing battle, against a company that has no interest in supporting your OS, with devs that are actively encouraged to support only the latest and greatest. By all means, get a refund for all those apps. You'll have much better success at that than getting all those devs to stop their profitable development to go back and fix something that is irrelevant for 99% of customers. I don't mean to be harsh, but that's the facts. You need to try to get your refunds, and move on.
Deliberate policy to make IOS3 obsolete? That's the first proof I have seen of what is obvious in the App Store. Apple are selling devices that will be rendered unusable for some of their intended uses in 3 or even 2 years years after being bought. I have an iPod Touch 1st gen and it's still a great product - it still has the original battery and I use it daily. I use it for email, web, banking, Ebay, Facebook, games and so on - just what it was sold for. Oh, and music! But especially over the last 6 months, almost none of my apps have been updated and I can hardly find one in the App Store that runs on IOS3. To support what the OP said, I find many more apps install but crash than are truly IOS3 compatible. And as soon as an app gets changed to IOS4+ you can never again get the old version because Apple are in control - and I think that is dishonest. Apple should keep older IOS versions available for much longer. The problem is that Apple run the whole IOS market to encourage or force users to throw out their old devices (if they haven't already broken outside warranty) and buy shiny new ones and then buy a whole new load of apps. Great for Apple and great for app developers but terrible value for customers. Fortunately Apple have not yet run out of customers that fall in line and pay up, so why bother about older models and their owners. I guess my biggest mistake was to buy an iPod which I didn't break, lose or have stolen and it isn't an iPhone with an eye-watering contract that I can upgrade "free" after 2 years. Silly me.
This guy has a point. Some people maybe too poor to upgrade every year. If the product says it runs on IOS 3 then it should because that is what it's been claimed. Apple should really give you your money back and take it off the devs royalty checks. Most of those crash bugs on the first page are programmer errors - they are using parts of the SDK that don't exist on iOS 3. With recently doing the Universal update of Jet Car Stunts I made sure it worked all away back to IOS 3.1 and weak linked in the newer SDK functions and made sure the code paths would not call any of the newer functions that would crash IOS 3.1. This is not hard to do on the devs side and the devs that don't do this are just plain lazy. Sorry for been harsh to the developers here but the ones that ignore this poor mans request are not handling things in a professional manner. If they don't want to cater for iOS 3 then they should compile for a higher SDK and Apple should give the money back because the software that was bought has been rendered useless. No one likes faulty goods... and that goes for everything we buy in our lives.
Less of the "poor" please! ...More like everyone else is the fool, what's with the need to keep paying? I could buy another machine but why? My current one still does (most of) what it did when I bought it so it doesn't need replacing and I don't need a new machine to avoid the shame of having last year's model. I even recently managed to beg for enough pennies (God bless you guv'nor) to buy our son a new iPad when he graduated. With our hard-earned cash we bought one of our daughters an iPod Touch 4th gen last Christmas and 5 days later she dropped it and the screen smashed. £90 for a replacement - the kids had to go without new shoes but it was worth it. A few months ago her sister borrowed it and she dropped it. Another £90. I almost had to sell our youngest for medical research but my wife found a new way to make some money at evenings and weekends. These things are brittle. My old 1st gen is rock hard, so Apple obviously realised it was over-designed Apple have designed a brilliant gravy train and if you don't run alongside, you get left behind, as I have discovered.
Because of forum's limit, I can't update first-post (too long !). Here are some more: Thanks. PS: yes, there are "big names" in these lists. Even rich companies, with tons of programmers, refuse to fix their apps...
In iOS 4, 5, and 6, the appstore automatically prevents you from updating your app if the next version requires a higher iOS than the one installed on your device. I don't know if this is a new feature or not because I've only been around since just before the update to iOS 4. In any case, developers can certainly mark an app as incompatible and prevent installation, update, and yes, even the purchase. I've seen it happen in all three situations. So if devs are not doing this, then they are either irresponsible or willfully ignoring it, and you certainly deserve a refund (or at least a version rollback for your apps-- but iTunes has basically no support for that at the moment).
Yup, that's what this comes down to. Apple just doesn't care. They'd rather pay out a few refunds and keep encouraging people to constantly upgrade their devices. The way things are going for them, it would seem to be a cost effective strategy.
