[Aeolun]

Oh, but they’ll allow you to keep already installed apps, so the only thing you need to do when you get a new phone is figure out which of your 100 apps have been unpublished in the meantime.

And then, I dunno, decide you are not going to upgrade because you don’t want devices in your house to be expensive bricks.

[logbiscuitswave]

Not necessarily. I bought a very expensive cat toy robot that had a companion app. The company that made it didn’t just hide the app, they delisted it entirely. When I upgraded to a new phone, the download links were dead. It started me down a journey of coding my own replacement and reverse engineering the device’s firmware and BLE protocols which was a fun and rewarding experience. But, the fact that this was even necessary really stunk.

[nicolas_t]

You can actually reinstall unlisted apps on a new phone They're available in the past purchase section. Not to defend Apple (especially since it's so hidden that very few users find it) but at least there's that.