pgetsos

Bought it for my wife a few weeks ago. Super happy for what I got for the price

The battery life is the main reason I haven’t upgraded my OG Galaxy Watch

Of course you can find them! They are not deleted. You cannot upload a NEW app or an update to one not targeting API 31 or newer

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.melato.bus.android

Here is an extremely useful app for Athens’ transportation system with no other similar, and I can’t use it because “it is old”. Last app update in 2014 with a target of 5.1 iirc

If we go to Games, we can find hundreds of great older games that we lost access to for no reason. And as I said before but you skipped it, we now lose access to ALL of our bought apps and games that stopped updating for whatever reason…

This also means I cannot find any old app/game on play store. So even with adb (which I do not think is a good solution because it excludes 99,9% of the users, not only tech-savvy users want or need older apps) I can only install apps I know of and that I can find their apk on the internet. I cannot browse the play store for them. I cannot search for something I need, because I will never find them. And if it is a paid app/game? Well, tough luck, I have to go find a cracked apk in shady marketplaces… So much so for security.

If they really do this for security, it could have been a switch in the developer settings or anything like that. Not a hard ban on older apps

It’s not good. This affects only apps that have been abandoned for various reasons, such as dead developers, now defunct companies, developers that lost interest etc. There are tons of still very useful apps and of course tens of games that I already lost access to when I bought my S23, and now this means even more apps and games (and this list will only get larger with every new update)

There is no reason to artificially break new apps. Could you imagine if Windows 11 could run only software made in the last 5 years? It would be a nightmare. After all, no new apps can be uploaded to Play store if they don’t target a very recent version