Hi everyone. I just wanted to vent a little at something I found to be extremely surprising to me. The TL;DR version of this is that none of your app store purchases are guaranteed to always be available to you.
What I had always thought was that if you go to the app store, and you buy an app, you will always be able to re-download it or put it on another device. It was my understanding that once you purchase it, it’s yours. That’s half the glory of having everything in the cloud–no more CDs with software, no more keeping track of serial numbers, and all that other jazz. You just go to the app store and get what you paid for.
Well, no.
So, here’s the story: It all started with a sticker pack. My wife and I use this cute series of sticker packs with iMessage. I found them, bought them, and then re-bought them and gifted them to her. We use them all the time, and love them because they’re ‘our’ stickers that we use just with one another—it’s a nice way to acknowledge your special sweetheart. Anyway, we have all five of these sticker packs bought, and we installed them on our iPhones and I have them on my iPad.
Sometime in the last year, the developer for reasons unknown removed the packs for sale from the app store. We thought “how cool—now we’re two of very few people to have them!” and this was true. Through a couple of iOS revs, and a ton of updates, I was able to re-download them whenever, and it was cool. Then last night, I tried to get them onto my wife’s iPad, which was the only i-device in the house to not have them, and I couldn’t do it. They simply didn’t exist, not in the purchase history, not in the store, no where. I struggled with it for a while, contacted support and we were on for an hour and a half trying to figure it all out, I was bounced to two different people, and in the end, they said there was nothing to be done. The exact wording was:
“I have checked our resources and it looks like the reported app is no longer available on iTunes Store, and that’s the reason you are unable to install the app on your other device. I am really not sure, how you are still able to access the same app on your iPhone, as it has already been removed from the store.”
When I reiterated that I knew that it was gone from the store, but that I had purchased it, and could produce all the documentation from the purchase history and that technically, I own these packs, all that he said was:
“I am really sorry to inform you but we do not have any option at the moment to make this content available.”
I went to bed unsatisfied with this. I decided to go to the Apple store in my city today, and talk to someone about it rather than just on chat to who knows who. They couldn’t tell me the answer to this either, and so arranged for someone from Apple to call me. The call came, and I went through it all with them again, and came to the same result.
Now, to be fair, I know this is just a set of silly iMessage stickers. But I asked if this kind of thing extended to the rest of the store. I point-blank asked that if a developer puts an application on the store for $100, I buy it and then the next day the developer takes it off the store, will I then never be able to get it again? The answer was that yes, this is the case. The best that Apple could do in that scenario is to issue a refund if the purchase was made recently. If you’re a month out, you’re completely out of luck. This applies to pretty much everything. So if you bought all your movies on iTunes, and the producer decides to cut ties with Apple, there goes your movie library content.
Maybe I’m being stupid about it, but I really did find this shocking. I mean, why would I ever want to use the App Store or iTunes when there’s always a chance that my purchases could simply vanish without recourse?
I mistakenly thought that somehow there was some agreement in place that even IF the content was removed from sale, that it would still always be available to those who had already bought it. That is not the case. Even if I had a local copy of the stickers, there’s no legal way to get them on the phone.
Anyway, I wanted to vent and thought someone here may want to know too. I guess there really was an upside to that physical disk in the packaging.