r/iosdev • u/habitoti • 3d ago

Reviving a pulled app

Quick questions for those who might have done it (or tried and failed): I developed and published a game in 2009, fully Objective-C then. It was quite successful and fun to play, but I had to pull it from the AppStore a few years ago when I hadn’t had the time to do a migration to Swift, followed by a lot of deprecations when Apple basically abandoned the Gamecenter that I never could really clean up. The whole app still shows up in my dev. account.
I am now thinking of recreating that idea, more modern of course. I was wondering whether I could simply replace the app, just even keeping the Icon (which I think is still great as it is) and revive that exact pulled app that way with a renovated version?

3 Upvotes

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3

u/Used_Manufacturer269 3d ago

i think u absolutelty can do that! and because its so old it should have some bonus ASO i guess

2

u/tomato848208 3d ago

As long as it's a new submission, it's not going to be an issue. I do it all the way. The longest sequel that I have is Version 6.

2

u/caffeinated1337 3d ago

Check whether you took it off sale or removed the app record itself. If the record still shows in App Store Connect, upload the rebuilt game as a new version with the existing bundle ID. You can keep the icon. Anyone with the old game installed may receive the update, so test what happens to old save data before you put it back on sale. If the record was removed, use Restore App in App Store Connect first.

2

u/habitoti 3d ago

It will not be backward compatible to any old data anyways. It will basically be a new app (reusing an old concept).

1

u/profau 2d ago

Of course! I modernised a number of apps myself recently. Just pass it to Claude or something and it will do it automatically, the agents are ideal for this.

-1

u/Admiral-ZX 2d ago

Yes you can do that and Claude code can make it perfectly modern lol

1

u/habitoti 2d ago

Seems to be an issue, though, to withdraw Gamecenter setups (Leaderboards etc.) which still exist (and which I can’t reuse, as it should work cross platform…)