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Perhaps we need to consider if something is wrong about this culture of constant upgrades.

Not just phone apps, but other applications too. Upgrades are actually hostile to the end user. There's nothing to counter the incentives of companies to keep sneaking in more ways to squeeze money out of their users.

Interestingly thinking back, I remember when I first discovered Chrome's aggressive autoupdate and I felt disquieted. Now I have a better sense that it's fundamentally not to the benefit of the end user. Actually there's some benefits for web developers, which tricks them into becoming part of this culture, and heavily pushing for these newer browsers with their built-in autoupdates now.

Problem is, most software upgrades are all-or-nothing. You can’t just take the good (security fixes, better performance, etc.) and leave the bad (reduced functionality, new worse UI, more ads). It’s in my view a major unsolved problem in software.

Amazon's Freetime unlimited store is entirely ad-free apps, and bans in-app purchases, from what I can tell. It's only available on Kindle Fire devices, but it's a good option. (I think a big part of that is that you pay $3/mo for access)

The versions of Angry Birds there are ad-free and in-app-purchase-free.

> The games that Apple promotes / features in the store are usually less obnoxious, but I'm not sure if there's a way to search for them.

It’s not great, but you could look for Apple Design Award winners, which are usually ad-free.

> I'd easily pay 10€ to get back the original version of Angry Birds that I bought in 2010 or so, but that version is gone for good.

You can still find old APKs of it on the internet. I had to use one because the updated game has become unplayably slow on my 2015ish phone.

I think I still have the original Angry Birds game installed on a ~10 year old iPod touch I have laying around. I'll have to make sure to preserve that now, if it's impossible to get older versions of games like that.

Hopefully you've kept that device off the internet. Tyler paid for version I have was updated to gimp the game, so not only do you have beat the previous level you also need a certain amount of coins that do not transfer between levels. You can of course buy them. I tried playing after discovering how terrible Angry Birds 2 was. There away are still unlimited lives and as far as I can tell the other older spin off games haven't had their mechanics changed.

Good point, and I definitely would anyway because I'm sure it's got many unpatched vulnerabilities and issues.

> Angry Birds was a really nice game

IMHO it was a really bad game.

However, to me again, it was a really nice piece of addicting software.