It didn’t occur to me until I pur­chased my third iPhone that I couldn’t retrieve older apps for use with my older iPhone. Your old iPhone/iPod touch becomes obso­lete in a mat­ter of 4 years under Apples approach to serv­ing up only the lat­est apps. Sure, some of the apps in the app store will still work, but even­tu­ally your device will be left in the dust. I real­ize you can keep the device around for play­ing music and some other basics but, on the whole who’s going do that? So where does that leave the device? Who is going to want this as a hand-me-down if you can’t even install new apps as the iOS for the device is no longer sup­ported? Why doesn’t Apple allow older apps for their respec­tive devices? Before you go scream­ing greed, it seems to me that new pur­chases of old apps would be a pretty good chunk of rev­enue added to Apple’s bot­tom line from the sup­posed end-of-life products.

I don’t see this being a sup­port issue as the prod­ucts could be labeled as such and respec­tive devel­op­ers would have the option of decid­ing when a prod­uct would be shelved. Regard­less, if an app is work­ing per­fect with an older ver­sion of the iOS, and the user is con­tent with the older device, what’s the big deal? It’s free money at that point and it works in it’s own anti­quated atmos­phere. If this doesn’t change,  I see these not-so-older devices head­ing to the land­fill faster than their desk­top counterparts.

With regard to the Mac App store, I see the same sce­nario being installed right before our very eyes and this wor­ries me. The Mac App store han­dles all your pur­chases and keeps your copies in wait­ing for you. But what hap­pens if you need to down­grade to an older com­puter you keep in your closet for that just-in-case moment? We’ve been able to back up and keep copies in the past for those just-in-case sce­nar­ios, it seems it’s all going to be trusted to iCloud or your Apple ID. Should we be concerned?