“If it hasn’t happened to you already, then some day you’re going to lose an iOS app that’s been taken off the app store, and Apple’s choices along the way may stop you from getting it back,” William Gallagher writes for AppleInsider. “Try looking on the bright side for a moment. For years everyone has been telling you to back up your iPhone to your Mac and you’ve never bothered. Now you don’t have to — but that’s because as of macOS Mojave, there’s just no point. ”
“So let’s take a moment to applaud how Apple has made iCloud backups better over the years,” Gallagher writes. “There is no longer any discernible difference between the two and that’s because Apple has removed the single greatest reason to back up to your Mac… It’s the backups we miss.”
“You can see their logic. Any of us can search the App Store and when we find an app we’ve previously bought, it’s shown to us with an iCloud download icon instead of the price or a Get button. Click on that and the app redownloads,” Gallagher writes. “[The problem is that] Apple removes apps from the App Store. Permanently… There is a solution: third-party app iMazing will let you manage your new and old apps on your Mac.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: You know who’s really pissed? That guy, yes, that guy, who bought the “I Am Rich” app and then lost it forever because he didn’t back it up!
Don’t be that guy!
SEE ALSO:
‘I Am Rich’ developer sold 8 copies for $999.99 each before Apple censored app – August 8, 2008
‘I Am Rich’ application for iPhone, iPod touch disappears from Apple’s App Store – August 07, 2008
$999.99 app for Apple iPhone, iPod touch allows owners to proclaim ‘I Am Rich’ – August 06, 2008
While its always possible that there is some app that Apple thwacked, because the developer has not updated it or no longer meets new dev guidelines or the dev is obviously gone.. Do you really want a completely unsupported app on your iPhone??
And its days are numbered anyway as iOS rolls on and one day will not run it anyway.
Maybe maybe not, but who’s business other than mine is it whether to or not?
Paid for the phone, paid for the app. Eff off Apple.
Some of us have perfectly functioning older hardware (iOS or MacOS) that can’t run the latest operating system version. Consequently, we can’t run apps on those devices that have been updated to add newer OS versions and drop older ones.
The older versions are no longer available in the App Store—only the new ones that we can’t run. iTunes and iCloud backups no longer save the old versions, only a link to the new version on the App Store if the app is available at all. If we lose the old version for some reason, such as the need to erase and restore our device, we lose the app entirely.
The alternative for us isn’t between a supported app and an unsupported version. It is between a functioning device and one with no software at all.
Where unsupported = old and no longer supported…
So someone wants to run an unsupported app on an unsupported iOS on an unsupported iPhone. Let them.
Scaler has been my favorite calculator app for a long time. I consider the developer’s implementation of the paper tape to be the best. For unknown reasons, the developer abandoned the project. http://bit.ly/2xYR5GP
Thanks to iMazing, I was able to retrieve and reinstall the last version of the app. Still works perfectly, with no apparent conflicts.
Check out one of the several HP 41cx emulators which have a paper tape output of your calculations.
I bought a Garmin iPad navigation app for not small money. Garmin discontinued the app because it was cutting in on their hardware navigation devices, Now the only way to keep using the app is to have a way to back it up. It’s not only discontinued fart apps that people need to save.
iMazing screwed up my ability to back up my iPhone to my computer. Even Apple couldn’t figure out what the problem was. I was able to fix it using a terminal command, which un-hijacked the backup process and gave it back to iTunes.
Also, iMazing failed to actually back up my phone, which left me high and dry. Perhaps they’ve fixed these issues, but I’m hesitant to try again, given the past performance.
Yet another little change that Apple is doing that I don’t like.
Bring back the original iPad SimCity game!!
QUIT FORCING THINGS TO THE CLOUD! FFS, not all of us live n hyper-connected Silicon Valley. Where I live, the cloud s NOT a reliable place to store anything, the upload/download speeds are far too slow so things take too long (when they do work), and who the heck wants to pay Apple for the 512 Gb of iCloud storage for their mega iPhone XS Max backup?