[jwells89]

Part of this is that it’s only been recently that mobile OSes have started to approach a similar level of maturity as their desktop counterparts, while also introducing and developing new concepts that desktop OSes never had (like permissions). For some number of years a high level of churn was inevitable.

As for the, “binary too old” thing on the Play store that could be a low effort way of weeding out apps with security vulnerabilities due to old dependencies. There isn’t really an equivalent on Windows for this because it doesn’t have any kind of centralized, hosted app management (at least that people actually use). It’s not uncommon for maintainers of Linux package manager repos to remove “abandoned” (as in hasn’t received any updates in X time) packages for similar reasons, leaving users who want them to source them elsewhere.