Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

> Competition on the App Store has risen to a frenzied level.

This is a curious argument to make. The platform is too popular? Would it have made any sense at all if anyone made the same claim about, say, Windows game development?

I suspect what this really means is "there are more games than ever, and the iOS App Store is becoming increasingly difficult to rely on as a discovery mechanism, thus requiring advertising to users with other mediums", but that's kind of always been true, and it's certainly been true of all desktop platforms. Which makes me wonder why iOS can't simply be treated the same way non-mobile platforms are and rely on more traditional marketing channels?

The only other way to interpret this that I can think of is "it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify a >$5 price for a game", but I haven't seen any sign of that being true. iOS has had a "race to the bottom" mentality for prices since the app store first opened. There's always been a ton of free or $0.99 games, and a relatively low number of pricer-but-higher-quality games. I don't think this has changed in years, with perhaps the only real difference being that game developers are becoming increasingly sophisticated about how they apply F2P techniques. And as a bit of anecdata, the most impressive game I've seen on iOS in a while is a brand new one called Implosion that costs $9.99 and, at the time of this comment, has a solid 5-star rating with 311 reviews.

> Competition on the App Store has risen to a frenzied level. As a result, sales for our games has dropped massively and the cost of advertising them has shot through the roof.

So... Actually make good games? I don't know what the games of this studio are, but if you can't shine anymore in an app store just because there are more competitors, maybe your products weren't that good to begin with?

I admire the developer, but the whole post feels like a cop-out blaming Apple. Too much competition? Let's give up. Engine broke from some change, don't want to try fixing it? Let's give up.

Ads cost too much? Not, 'let's stop advertising on iOS', instead, Let's give up.

I can understand as much as the next iOS developer that changes that require large workarounds due to software/hardware updates that aren't backwards compatible are a pain. But as a developer, you suck it up, modify your content, and continue (Edit: Of course, if it makes financial sense, positive ROI, etc, to keep selling on the Appstore).

Why do developers feel entitled to hardware devices that will always work with legacy code? Apple makes changes that try to push their technology forward to the latest and greatest, all the while removing legacy cruft at the expense of sometimes trading off backwards compatibility. It makes sense that they expect their developers to keep up with the latest trends and produce content that's formatted to the current specs, not simply relying on old tech specs.

If the engine was hybrid/webview based, that has been a mess since iOS 8 came out.

It makes sense to get out when it's not profitable. In this case, it's a small segment of their sales. They said so directly in their explanation. If there were no sales on iOS, would that be giving up, or just accepting it's not a profitable segment for your business?

> Why do developers feel entitled to hardware devices that will always work with legacy code?

First, I'm not sure where you are getting that sentiment from. They simply said they aren't going to support iOS devices, and listed why. They didn't complain Apple was doing something wrong.

Second, how is this in any way related to the hardware? An OS software revision caused the latest problem for them.