Time To Refresh the Apps
This fall I’m going to try to refresh all of my iOS apps. Well, almost all of them.
The games that I built with Flash, all except one, haven’t really panned out. There are just too many in the app store and I haven’t done much to market them. So it is time to make them all free.
That means ads. I would have probably made them all free with ads before if I could have. But originally you couldn’t use iAd in a Flash-made game. Now that you can use native extensions in AIR, I should be able to pull it off. I’d like to have a little ad revenue, plus the ability to serve my own ads. I have enough games that the reach of advertising could be enough to promote my own projects — new content at MacMost.com, new games, sites etc.
The problem is that I can’t simply update the games. The problem lies in the fact that the original Packager for iOS in Flash compiled for ARMv6 processors. That’s the iPhone 1 and 3G. Those apps work fine on the 3Gs and 4. And the iPad too.
But the new Packager for iOS compiles to ARMv7. Those won’t work on the iPhone 1 and 3G. So Apple simply doesn’t allow you to update your app from one architecture to the other. Doing so would mean that people who have your app on those old phones suddenly couldn’t use it anymore.
Normally this is no big deal. If you were using Xcode and had an old app you would just continue to compile it for ARMv6. But I don’t have an option with Flash. Things simply are ARMv7 whether I like it or not. Probably some of the new AIR stuff only works on ARMv7.
So I have come out with new apps and abandon the old ones. That only will work because I’m going from a paid to free model. Actually, it would work the other way too. It would suck if I had to do a paid to paid model, but then I could simply come out with “version 2.0.” And charge for it and no one would care that much.
But the idea here is I’m going from paid to free without really adding new features. So I can’t call them 2.0. Or, at least I don’t think that would be right.
But I’m going to do something almost not-as-right. I’m going to call them “HD.” The reason for that is most of the game are also going to get native screen resolution on the iPad. That’s something that Flash does for me without too much extra effort. So they are HD versions. And also now free. And also now with ads.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, no I can’t simply call them with the same name as the old ones as that is also not allowed. At least not easily. Names must be unique in the iOS app store.
I’ll launch these and then quickly drop the old versions. Not a perfect solution, but the best I can think of.