Comment by syntheticnature
2 days ago
I had a Google Play app whose dev died. It was just a simple local app -- no network server usage. When I last upgraded my phone (due to imminent failure of the previous one) it refused to copy the app over -- and the app was no longer in the Play store.
I still have the APK for one called "Backitude" and have kept migrating it for years since the disappearance of the developer.
It's nothing special, just a location tracker that logs to a file every so often based on time and/or distance moved (could also ping a URL with encoded location info instead). Basically the underlying data for location history without relying on Google. Its notable feature years ago was that it would do location 'steals' - instead of just triggering a then-expensive location check, it would grab the most current available location info as triggered by some other application and only force an update if that information was too old.
More evidence of the sad state of general purpose computing
a more distant example is VLC on apple devices. I don't remember what happened anymore and any guesses would be speculation, but at one point on iphones you could not get VLC unless you had already gotten VLC.