Question

We have an existing game app that is now defunct and is just sitting there doing nothing. We are considering if the new game app that we are releasing can be released as an update to the old one. The old one has nothing in relation to this new one at all.

I am personally against doing this, but do any of you see any potential problems that could be caused by releasing the new game app as an update for the old one?

Thank you!!

Answer 1

I’m going to leave the moral or business take (and the app store guidelines issues) on the sideline here, and just talk technically.

There really isn’t much glue that handles app updates. All you need to do is use the same bundle identifier com.mydomain.myapp for the new one, and use a higher version number than the last release, and upload to the same “app” on the portal, and it should just work. The new version, that is totally different, should just replace the old one.

One case it may not work is if you have a lot of documents or local databases, or settings stored ont he phone, the new app will have to take into account some of that data if it uses the same keys or filenames. But if it’s totally different app, that’s probably not a big deal.

iPhone app store updates have very little magic. One packaged binary simply replaces the old one. The update could be a minor bug fix, or a complete codebase rewrite that performs a similar function, or a whole new app. There is no technical restriction.

Even app meta data like name, keywords, description, icons, can all be changed along with an update. Whether completely changing one app into another is cool with Apple though, I can’t claim to guess.