I'm nearly certain Apple DOES do that. As I understand it (please correct me): 1. Game for sale, you buy it. 2. Developer circles the drain, lets account expire, and game is no longer for sale. 3. But if you ALREADY bought it, it stays in Purchased History forever. 4. UNLESS there is some OTHER specific reason to pull the app--such as a legal challenge the dev can't fight--in which case it vanishes from Purchase History too. In that case (rare exception) you can still get the app from your iTunes backup, assuming you back up apps to iTunes; which is optional but I recommend it. In other words, I think Apple offers two levels of "pulling the app," neither of which costs the developer I would hope. I assume it is up to the developer to say which kind of "pull" they want (maybe some do a "full pull" just to stop getting support requests?), but that Apple can also do a "full pull" from their end if they've received a legal takedown request. Corrections? Details?
I'm pretty sure the EULA is that they're not responsible if the company goes under and the app isn't available in the AppStore anymore. FWIW, it's just something that you need to account for. I've actually ran into a couple of folks who encountered this issue. After some handheld gamers got chastised by them of how great iOS is b/c the games are cheaper, just as innovative, and you don't need to worry about losing physical cartridges/media because the purchases are tied to an account that you can always restore, the handheld gamers picked up some of their cartridges from 4 years ago and said "guess what? I can still play this game today, and 4 more years from now if I wanted to!"
Even if the game is pulled from my purchase history, I think it is in fact Apple's responsibility to back up the game in my iCloud storage, which I pay for. Gone from the store or not, a paid backup storage should actually back up what is on my device.
I have never agreed to any terms that said at some point in time items I purchase may not be available to me any longer. Therefore it seems like, legally Apple should not be able to just remove games people have paid for.
I am really disappointed that this issue hasn't gained more ground in the recent year. Even with the Bioshock incident compounding it
No, I think its your responsibility to back up the .ipa if you care that much, just like any digital content.
Maybe this should silence those who always go on about mobile games being cheaper than other platforms. Yes..because other platforms you actually have the game for a far longer period. You're not at the whim of updates nulling your game, or the game disappearing into history and unable to download again. (Though sure the dark market has it)
They can't keep apps forever because as soon as the developers stop updating, and Apple updates its OS, the app can no longer be playable.
Our previous purchases list should actually include all our previous purchases. Things can vanish without being broken. This should not happen. There should be a compatibility mode to prevent our purchases from breaking for no good reason. They could make it an optional download since it would take up additional space. BioShock broke in less than a year. The compatibility issue is a massive problem with iOS gaming.
There's going to be the matter of older apps that were never updated to include 64-bit support and will not work on a future iOS update, that's believed to be with the iOS 11 release. I thought of keeping my current iPad on iOS 10 and never update it. I don't know how viable that really is even though I intend on getting a new iPad with the presumed upcoming release.
Unless you use iTunes on your PC to download it directly to your PC. (Assuming it's still possible to download with your PC... I'm currently stuck on the last iTunes that's compatible with Windows Vista. I can still download apps with my PC... I assume they wouldn't remove that, since it gives people another place to buy things from the App Store. ) This change is quite inconvenient, compared to just syncing them over from my phone I always have with me. They couldn't just make an option to sync these thinned apps into a folder labeled *insert device type*? What laziness, just throwing out this convenience feature after all this time. (iOS 9 did it.) Making it harder to back things up. Seriously? What are they thinking?
