Phones that cost $1000+ are fine when you can keep them for 5+ years.
Of course you can buy a cheap phone, but for a 1K phone I expect support for more than 3 years or I wont buy it. That is one thing keeping me from switching back to Android. I likely never will with the preloaded crapware and lack of support.
Buying the 3 of them costs less than buying a single iPhone. They last longer than any iPhone due to the possibility to update the OS as long as there are developers working on the device. The 8yo Samsung gets weekly OTA updates (which I do not always install...).
On their bug reporting app, switching apps while having a bug report half filled-in in order to e.g. check which URL caused a recent crash, will immediately throw the bug reporting app out of memory and lose your half-entered bug report.
Updates within months of getting a brand new device (on the low end RAM-wise), seem to have completely ruined it. People have told me to buy one with more RAM and most issues would be resolved, but I don't want to throw in more money for uncertainty.
I now have an old iPhone and an iPad that both run great, but I can’t do anything useful with them.
Any app that you have previously downloaded can be downloaded again while viewing your purchase history (which includes free apps). For apps you never downloaded in the past, you would need to download the current version of the app on another device first.
You will receive the last version of the app that was compatible with that device.
The catch is that if you have never downloaded the app before, you don’t get that option.
You either have to initiate the download first on a newer device or use a version of iTunes that supports app downloads. You don’t have to sync from iTunes. Just download the app.