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Comment by mttjj | Hacker News Reader

iOS apps are listed in your purchase history and available for re-download. Even those removed from sale on the store. So unless you’ve hidden the app (an unnecessarily complex process) I’m not sure why you’re not able to continue playing The Binding or Isaac. Unless of course the app is old enough that it doesn’t work on newer iOS versions. But that’s not what your post was implying.

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> iOS apps are listed in your purchase history and available for re-download. Even those removed from sale on the store.

Nopety nope.

The Secret of Monkey Island vanished from my purchase history after Disney bought LucasArts. Apple support essentially said "Fuck off, dear customer". The end.

I bought a game (Lumines) that downloaded all the necessary game files upon launching from a server. The server is now down. No way to play the game even after downloading it from the list. screw the app store.

Wait, isn't this the fault of the company that made the app? How does the App Store have anything to do with a company shutting down their server or not?

I wish the App Store guidelines had a provision for disallowing that behaviour: if there's no online component (e.g something like WoW or Fortnite, that have regular content updates) then the app should be self-contained in the App Store.

Sadly it used to be the case (not sure now) that the app size limit had Apple itself recommend that behaviour be implemented when it was too big.

It might have been a mitigation for the 4G download limits where people couldn't download games over X size on 4G so they started downloading content on boot to get around it.

Seems likely considering it's a Japanese game.

This particular case is on the developers of the game, not the AppStore. Apple doesn’t have influence over the upkeep of third-party servers.

Apple should forbid this practice then. I have plenty of apps that I paid for that don’t work for various reasons. I don’t get to keep my purchases but Apple gets to keep their hefty 30% fee.

It's a little more complicated than that - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251183047

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