There are very obvious, important differences between the options they had available. Both in terms of general user expectations for end of life apps, as well as concrete promises made to their customers to make a sale.

Do you apply the same sort of lazy false equivalence to all moral and ethical questions? People will always complain, therefore you can do anything!

I don't think I've ever complained about an app going out of business and discontinuing updates, but I don't have any patience when they take active steps to renege on their promises by adding ads or taking features away - that's just fraud.

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forrestthewoods 2 days ago | parent [-]

I call bullshit on the claims of “promise”.

When you buy a $3 app on iOS this is not a contractual or moral obligation or promise to provide decades of updates for free.

Just because someone says a promise was broken doesn’t make it true.

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dns_snek 2 days ago | parent [-]

> When you buy a $3 app on iOS this is not a contractual or moral obligation or promise to provide decades of updates for free.

Who asked for free updates? I repeat:

> I don't think I've ever complained about an app going out of business and discontinuing updates

	▲	forrestthewoods 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Rather than the opening paragraph crying about “broken promises” (which weren’t actually ever promised) perhaps the article should complain that Apple won’t let you download old versions of apps you paid for. Of course Apple forces devs to update their apps every couple of years to support new minimum SDK requirements.