Buying a one time app for a few quid used to be a normal and a good deal all round (I say this as a customer and iOS developer)
But now EVERYTHING is a monthly subscription. Even for apps that really shouldn’t need any updates - but like you say, they do need constant updates just to remain functions.
It’s created a broken AppStore and I just never pay for anything anymore.
This does suck when you find an "old" app that works well, but there is an upside-- the 99% of other garbage apps from 15+ years ago don't pollute ongoing search results forever. Eventually, old apps that aren't maintained get popped from the stack.
The other upside is that new developers don't have to compete with ghost apps from the past continuing to leech new interest because they're ranked higher due to cumulative downloads over time. Nobody can compete with Time.
As an example of an app store that doesn't do this-- I don't know if ticalc.org is still around or still works this way, but their catalog grew endlessly with every generation of bored students uploading new redundant renditions of Drugwars (et al.). If you want to play Drugwars, which of the 500 versions of it are the best? Maybe the 1998 version is the best, or maybe the 2020 version is-- who can tell?
It made it very difficult to figure out what to bother with unless you were using a brand new TI-83+++ Extended APU Platinum Edition with bespoke hardware specs that forced a new backwards-incompatible platform category that instantly excluded all the old cruft.
Making DAU & avg active time per day in addition to user reviews/ratings would be a pretty strong signal.
Unfortunately, it's the norm in most massive closed source ecosystems like these.
On the one hand, it makes being a developer on these platforms pretty painful at times, and on the other hand, it also increases the value in having expertise with them.
Can you give an example? I have also plenty of Windows development experience, but can't think of anything. More like, Microsoft seems to be pretty careful making sure APIs don't break.
NTAPI doesn't count, because it's undocumented in the first place and you're not supposed to use it in the userland at all. Yeah, we all do, but...
(Many APIs are pretty bad in the first place, but that's another matter.)
In the context of developing something like Wine that is irrelevant - you need to deal with what people use.
> WWDC videos can be immensely useful to get inside information about how things actually work
Imagine if we could have proper text based documentation on how things actually work? I don't know why this isn't the case. I'm sure they can afford it. Maybe it's just lack of respect for developers? "They seem to figure it out anyways"?
