My oldest mobile app Sky Invaders turns five in October (having first being released for the iPhone on the 12th October 2012) and since that time I’ve been able to release the Sky Invaders on Android and Windows Phone (yes, Windows Phone).

In the past five years Sky Invaders has been downloaded approximately 40,000 times from game players in 192 countries which is simply mind-blowing to me. Now the iOS version really hasn’t been touched since October 2012, the same code has been in place and working well since the very beginning but it our time for change or as Apple puts “your 32 bit app will no longer work once iOS 11 is release later this year”.

over the past few weeks I’ve been getting familiar with the original source code again, and while I made comments in the code and it was easy to see what each function and procedure does I was amazed just how much I’ve changed in the way I now code (much cleaner than five years ago).

So I now have a choice to make while taking Sky Invaders 32 bit and making it 64 bit for iOS 11. Should I keep the code the same or should I make some changes,improve areas of the code and tidy up?

Part of me wants to just re-compile and move on but another part wants to re-write. What I’ll do I’m not sure but I’ve got a couple of weeks to decide so we’ll have to wait and see.