Will my app stay in the app store after I stopped paying developer fee to Apple? [closed]

Question

I have found another question

where the marked answer, from June 2010 is "Your apps will be removed" however, another person answers that apps will not be removed, and claims as recent as February this year to be sure of this.

I think Apple support pages are very vague on this matter.

Is there anyone out there who knows for sure what happens?

(I hope this behavior is okay (re-asking the same question in a new post) - ideally a bump of that thread would have been my choose, but I don't know how to do that, or if it is possible on Stack Overflow. I don't have enough reputation to comment or edit the other question.)

Answer 1

No.

See http://developer.apple.com/support/ios/program-renewals.html:

If I don't renew my membership will my application(s) still function for those customers who have already installed my application(s) from the App Store?

Yes. Although you will lose App Store distribution, your application(s) will still function for customers who have installed your application(s) from the App Store on their device(s).

It makes commercial good sense for Apple to stop featuring your app in their store when you're not paying the yearly fee, since the infrastructure used to host your app would still be an ongoing cost for them.

Also, if Apple didn't purge non-paying customer's apps, over time the app store would become a huge aggregation of unmaintained apps which would dwarf newer higher quality apps. Remember that Apple often releases updates to iOS which requires updates and tweaks to existing apps -- for them to keep stale unmaintained apps around just doesn't make any sense at all.