An app can die without a single line of its code changing. Nothing breaks inside; the world around it moves. A demo — or an AI-generated prototype — shows you an app on day one. The question that actually matters almost never gets asked: does it still work three years later, on day 1,095, when nobody has touched it since?
That's not a rhetorical question. Here is, precisely, what happens during those three years.
The inventory: what breaks when nothing moves
The stores change the rules. Apple and Google keep adding requirements — privacy declarations, minimum SDK versions, permission policies. A sleeping app isn't sheltered; it's the opposite: the day an update finally ships, it gets judged by today's rules, not the ones it was born under. And both stores have learned to sweep out apps that sleep too long. App review isn't a formality — it's a moving set of requirements with a judge on the other side, and anyone who has ever submitted an app knows that judge rejects more often than you'd think.
Operating systems deprecate. Every major iOS or Android release switches APIs off — or introduces new ones that gradually become mandatory. A feature that worked simply stops — often with no crash and no warning, just a screen that quietly no longer does what it used to. Nobody tells you: it's written in release notes that the creator of a "finished" app has no reason to read.
