Then you just try to avoid updating for as long as you can, untill something breaks or a feature you want is added, so you spend little as possible on updates. Imagine the security holes.

Well to be fair, for most software it was the major releases that were paid, and the minor ones were given free, on the understanding that these ~never contained functionality changes, additions or reworks.

So 3.1 was purely a bugfix for 3.0, for example. Hence you got it free. Often when 4.0 came out (which you had to pay to get) there's also a be a 3.2 update that served as the "final" rleease of that branch. Any bugs in it now are there to stay.

And yeah. Although, I feel in a way that's what we got here, no? If I paid for these I can turn updates off and use the version I bought, so to speak.

This would cause a maintenance nightmare for the devs though. And from what I hear, the app stores discourage multiple versions of the same app these days.