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Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

56 points diasks2 | 1 comments | 25 Aug 25 06:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

I developed a game called "Putter King Adventure Golf" for iOS and Android back in the 2010s. It's long since disappeared from the app stores, but my son recently asked if he could play it, which got me thinking about whether it might be recoverable.

I'm wondering if there's any way to find a copy of it somewhere on the web (I assume it was probably pirated at some point during its lifetime). And if I could find it, what would be the best approach to get it running again?

Has anyone here successfully recovered and revived their old mobile apps? I'd appreciate any suggestions on:

* Where to look for archived APKs or IPAs * How to sideload/run old mobile apps on modern devices * Whether emulators might be a viable option

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fastball ◴[26 Aug 25 13:29 UTC] No.45026276[source]▶
Where did the source code go?

I have all the code from dumb little games I made (and never released) from almost 20 years ago.

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mrweasel ◴[26 Aug 25 13:51 UTC] No.45026567[source]▶
I've lost so much code, photos and other digital assets over the years. I regret losing most of it, yet I can seem to get started on archiving the things I care about.

So many funny little project, so much code I'd like to revisit, so many photos lot.

Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder?

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gchadwick ◴[26 Aug 25 14:34 UTC] No.45027118[source]▶
> Any recommendations on how to start a life as a digital hoarder

Stop worrying about a well collated archive and just dump everything in a suitable storage medium. I've got years of random side projects and pretty much every photo I've taken going back many years. It's a complete mess, with various duplications, it's just not that big (few hundred GB maybe? I'm away from home so can't open up my NAS and look) so not worth my time to optimize it.

On the flip side it's fun to randomly browse through and take a trip down memory lane. When there's a particular thing I definitely want can be more of a pain to find than if I had any decent organization but that comes up rarely enough that I don't really care.

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1. diggan ◴[26 Aug 25 16:27 UTC] No.45028769[source]▶
> Stop worrying about a well collated archive and just dump everything in a suitable storage medium

I've been doing that for most of my things too (except projects, they get categorized and more), just shuck it all into one big directory, worked perfectly well for 20+ years!

And, since I punted organizing it for so many years, we now have LLMs, and I've ended up writing a tiny CLI that keeps an index of this disorganized pile, so while the pile itself is disorganized, thanks to LLM it was trivial to let it run for some days to categorize, tag and sort it all into an index.

Another successful example of my life philosophy of "everything solves itself eventually".