[vetinari]

Background: I needed to sync the contacts with Google. Meanwhile, Google disabled the ActiveSync support, the phone was reset, and I was looking for some app to do that. In the past, there were apps capable of doing so, but now, they were unavailable. Add to that inability to side-load the apps..

Regarding the retro-compatibility:

Nobody supports Android 1.x either. However, in the past, developers did upload their apps that did work on these devices. So why the users shouldn't be able to download these old versions?

And that's the difference. Apple actively removed old packages from the store, while Google just left them there. Just this alone makes the old android devices more useful.