How about an app originally designed for iPhone but is running on an iPad? iPhones can make calls, but iPads can't. Sure, a properly designed iPad app wouldn't try to use the phone functionality, but what if the developer is too lazy to develop a dedicated iPad app? Surely a crappy iPhone app running on iPad is better than no app at all?
There are plenty of apps already in the store. Apple wants to launch their new device and have tons of apps available. The best way to do that is for the apps to just run, not to require millions of developers (plenty of which no longer exist) to rebuild.
There are many forms of "crappy". Developer hygiene is one bar; user functionality is another.
"Crappy" here refers entirely to developer hygiene, which the user does not care about at all.
If the platform changed and Angry Birds crashed, the customer would not accept "but look at all of these other Angry Birds clone games still available" as an answer, they want the app they are familiar with.
The scenario is an app being run on a platform that doesn't meet its declared system requirements.
If an app requires Windows, and customer tries to run it instead on Xbox OS, then he should be surprised it even launches. He should not be surprised if it crashes on print.
> customer would not accept "but look at all of these other Angry Birds clone games still available" as an answer, they want the app they are familiar with.
Then he'll have to run that app on the OS it requires. He's free to sent to MS his complaint that Xbox does not run that OS.
When you have a platform, apps aren't always being rebuilt for it.
There is no "build" because the source code was lost when all of the company's assets were sold off in 2002.
There is no "build" because the developer made a game, put it on your app store, moved on to the next game and has no interest in supporting this game that isn't providing any significant new revenue.
There is no "build" because this is FooManager 6.0, the company that makes FooManger wants everyone to buy FooManager 7.0 and isn't making any further changes to 6.0.
It's an option, but it has its own downsides. It's a cross-platform API.
Someone wants to show some guests some of their photos and videos on their TV through their Xbox. Unfortunately they can't because their app (eg Samsung Gallery or iCloud or whatever) included a print button somewhere.
And with these inert functions, if Microsoft one day adds printing support to the Xbox, it'll just work in the photo app without any update.
Because then you're making every developer make a special build for every device. Most developers aren't going to care enough to make a dedicated Xbox or tablet build. You're just going to make the platform completely dead. It would be much better if all pre-existing apps could mostly run on them.
