A rant about Apple's App Store policy & A new Mr Nibbles Forever Update

A few weeks ago I got a friendly reminder from Apple that my Developer license was about to expire. What I hadn't realized however was that should it expire my games would no longer be available to download on the store.

I can sort of understand this policy for paid apps, should you app earn anything, where does Apple send the money to? But for totally free apps such as Mr Nibbles or Ectoplasm why do this? Its frustrating that I have to pay £80 per year just to keep my free games alive.

To add insult to injury, shortly after receiving the demand for cash from Apple I receive this lovely email:

So not only do I have to pay Apple for the privilege of keeping my free apps on their incredible store I also have to continually update them even tho there is nothing wrong with them. Sigh. I have no idea if I can sill even build my old games for iOS any more. Mr Nibbles was built using Haxe which has no doubt moved on significantly in the intervening years.

In other news I decided to release a new version of Mr Nibbles Forever this month too. I was kind of forced to do so as the highscores in the game relied upon Parse.com for its database and with that shutting down this month I thought that I would do an update to fix it.

While I was there I also decided to simplify things and bring them more inline with the PC version. With that in mind I ripped out all the IAPs and advertising and put a price of $0.99 on it instead. To be honest its probably what I should have done for the start it would have saved me a bunch of time and headaches if I had done so.

Well thats is for now, not too much to report on. I have been busy preparing for the next few months, researching, shopping and organizing. Hopefully ill have some exciting news to report on in that direction soon!