Comment by mschuster91

> The idea of not compensating for software took hold in the 2000s, both with engineers and consumers (remember when users scoffed at 99 cent apps?)

Part of that was that the platform churn costs were a new thing for developers that needed to be priced in now. In the "old world" aka Windows, application developers didn't need to do much, if any at all, work to keep their applications working with new OS versions. DOS applications could be run up until and including Windows 7 x32 - that meant in the most ridiculous case about 42 years of life time (first release of DOS was 1981, end of life for Win 7 ESU was 2023). As an application developer, you could get away with selling a piece of software once and then just provide bug fixes if needed, and it's reasonably possible to maintain extremely old software even on modern Windows - AFAIK (but never tried it), Visual Basic 6 (!!!) still runs on Windows 11 and can be used to compile old software.

In contrast to this, with both major mobile platforms (Android and iOS) as an app developer you have to deal with constant churn that the OS developer forces upon you, and application stores make it impossible to even release bugfixes for platforms older than the OS developer deems worthy to support - for Google Play Store, that's Android 12 (released in 2021) [1], for iOS the situation is a bit better but still a PITA [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44222561