Mobile Frustration, or the inherent non-greenness of Apple’s outlook on software

An excerpt from a recent email exchange which begins to express  some of my thoughts on this matter. More later.

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Aaron Wallentine, Aug 07 02:31 pm (EDT):

Hey, is it possible to get an older version of the app so I can run it on my iPhone? I know you must have had a version that ran on iOS 3. I find it frustrating that almost everything on the App Store now seems to require iOS 4 or later, when I know that most of those apps worked on iOS 3 at one time.

One of the frustrating things about Apple is they don’t seem to care much about their customers who don’t always upgrade to the latest and greatest. My old iPhone is still a great device, and quite pricey at the time, but Apple seems to want to make it harder and harder for me to use it.

/rant 🙂

Anyhow, my phone is jailbroken, so if you can even just send me the binaries, I can probably get it working. I don’t care if it’s not supported, I won’t be asking you for support. If I can get it running, I’ll be happy.

Thanks very much; hope you’re well, wherever you are.

Peace,

Aaron

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On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Christopher Gamblée-Wallendjack <notifications-support@harvestapp.com> wrote:

## Please REPLY ABOVE THIS LINE to add comments to ticket ##

Christopher Gamblée-Wallendjack, Aug 07 02:46 pm (EDT):HI Aaron, Thanks for getting in touch! Unfortunately, no, we can’t provide anything of this nature. That said, our newly revamped mobile site will work great on your device — just go to your Secure Site in Mobile Safari, and check it out! Let me know if you need anything else. Regards, Christopher

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From: Aaron Wallentine
Platform: chrome 21.0.1180.60 (webkit 537.1) Windows XP

Aaron Wallentine ✆	11:57 PM (10 minutes ago)
to Support

Argh.  That’s frustrating. Any normal software program, and you can just grab an old version of the program that still works on whatever hardware you have.  This brave new world of mobile devices, while I love it, is locked into Apple’s silly software distribution model.  While it certainly benefits  developers by providing such a nice and easy marketplace to sell apps (which I can certainly appreciate as a developer myself), it locks end-users into an unnecessarily harsh and short upgrade cycle which is not inexpensive.

/rant 🙂

Thanks for the reply; I do use the mobile site, but it’s not nearly as fast, easy,  resource-efficient, or convenient as using a native app with offline storage, nor does it allow the benefit of working in those times when my device is not network-connected.

Can you at least appreciate the silliness and unnecessary heartache this sort of software model creates?  Why not allow a way of downloading older versions of an app that will still work with a given,  older, device, which not so long ago was still shiny and new?  Is it really that difficult?  You don’t even have to provide support for older devices; just provide them as-is for convenience of those so inclined, with a possible disclaimer that support is not provided, compatibility and bug-free-ness is not guaranteed?  Could even be provided as a separate entry in the app store, requiring no jailbreaking or software hackiness for end-users: “Harvest App – Current Version” and then “Harvest App – iOS 3.x Version (no longer  officially supported)”, etc etc.

I mean, why not? Really?