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.
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.