I blame the greed of the Phone manufacturers refusing to continue to support the newer OS’s to try to force people to buy new phones from them.
Developers can’t be expected to continue supporting out of date OS’s forever. Nobody supports Symbian OS or Palm OS anymore, among countless others. In a way older Android and iOS versions are fairly similar situations, they just can’t handle the things that are in demand anymore. Manufacturers purposely won’t allow upgrades to the old phone models because then they’d lose money. It’s kind of their way of a long term subscription model…force everyone to buy a new phone once in a while so their cashflow continues. They COULD allow it, but they don’t have any monetary incentive to do so. Apple supports the longest because they do get money for continued support in a way with all the other services and eco system requirements that get you locked in. App Developers have to draw a line somewhere and when demanded features aren’t available on deprecated OS’s, they kind of have to move on. I’d say 5-7 years back in phone models is a fair line to draw though.
Though I do agree with the point about making older APK’s available on the website. I’m totally onboard with that.