Apps require constant maintenance. If you just leave an app in Play Store or App Store and don’t touch it for a while, in couple of years it will be gone. Compliance requirements, obsolete APIs, forceful upgrades by the Apple/Google all see to that.

That means you need to keep the app project updated and all dependencies in reasonable form. It’s not outlandish if you are a big company but as someone who oversaw the development of platforms where you had apps dedicated to hardware - it definitely takes effort. I can understand why companies want to cut loose ends here.

they don't require constant maintenance. They are forced to receive constant maintenance. Ex if you don't release updates, you get delisted. But you wrote a calculator app. What updates and maintenance does it require that wasn't forced on you by google/apple by changing out the os from under you, or simply because they feel like it?

This is wrong. Yes, they require constant maintenance. But that maintenance is pretty limited in scope, if it is required even. All they have to do is to push some updates once or twice a year at max, and maybe update the usage of some APIs. It's not like these companies can't do it. In the grand scheme they wouldn't even notice it if one of their developers would do that.

It's that they just don't want to. They're greedy as hell, and they don't care about you.

Even if it would be too much work at one point, e.g. if Apple would finally update their Bluetooth stack more often then every 10 years, and the API completely changes. Why not just open source the whole app, or at least their interface so independent developers could develop something so not all of their products need to go into the waste? Because even in this hypothetical scenario, one thing holds true: They're greedy and they don't care about you.

I unironically look forward to the world where this is solved by unsupervised AI agents incrementally upgrade these apps to keep them evergreen...

...and the Lovecraftian gradual drift as incremental recursive hallucinations turn them into still... mostly working... strange little app-like-bundles of Something Weird.

On the other hand, if someone searches "appname apk", they will be able to download it forever, and install it for another year (thanks google!).

just yet another example of dying companies could be heroes by releasing their code to the public