I updated to iOS 11 on Tuesday night, the day it actually went out to everyone, and by Wednesday morning I'd lost four apps. Not "lost" like a bug wiped my data, lost like they just stopped existing. iOS 11 dropped support for 32-bit apps entirely, which Apple had been warning about for a while if you paid attention to the little "this app will not work with future versions of iOS" popup, and almost nobody pays attention to that popup.
One of the casualties was a flashlight app I'd been using since roughly 2013. It did one thing. It turned the LED on. It had a black background with a big white circle you tapped, no ads, no permissions nonsense, and the developer clearly stopped touching it around iOS 8 and just let it ride. Gone now. Tap the icon, get a gray ghost version of the icon and a message telling me to go find an update in the App Store. There is no update. There will never be an update. The guy who made it probably doesn't even remember it exists.
I also lost an old Scrabble clone that I specifically kept around because it had zero online multiplayer nonsense and just let you play pass-and-play against your spouse on the couch, and a note-taking app called Notesy that I hadn't opened in over a year but apparently my brain considered load-bearing, because losing the option to open it bothered me more than it should have.
The interesting part, if you want to call it that, isn't the update itself, it's how invisible the whole thing was. Nobody sends you a list beforehand. There's no "here's what you're about to lose" screen during setup. You just start tapping icons the next day and some of them don't work anymore, like finding out a shop on your street closed down because you walked past the empty storefront instead of getting a letter. Reddit threads on r/apple were full of people in the same boat, mostly annoyed about specific old games, a few genuinely upset about accessibility apps or one-off utilities that never got a 64-bit rebuild because the developer had moved on to literally anything else with their life.
To be fair to Apple, they've been telegraphing this since iOS 9, and 64-bit hardware has been standard since the iPhone 5s in 2013, so this isn't some out-of-nowhere rug pull. It's just that "we told you two years ago in a settings menu nobody opens" and "you woke up and your flashlight app is dead" feel very different in practice. I don't think Apple owes anyone a eulogy for a five-year-old flashlight app. I do think a one-time "here's what's about to break" prompt before the update installs would've cost them nothing and saved a lot of people the little jolt of opening something familiar and getting a wall instead.
Separately, and much smaller as far as I can tell nobody outside tech circles even noticed, Google announced this week that it's paying HTC something like 1.1 billion dollars for a chunk of HTC's phone design team and a license to some of its patents. Not buying HTC outright, just hollowing out the part of it that's been building Google's own Pixel phones under contract. If you've ever wondered why the Pixel and the HTC U11 sort of feel like cousins, that's why, and now it sounds like Google just wants to stop paying rent on the relationship and own the crew doing the actual engineering. Doesn't affect me today. Probably matters a lot in about two years.
Anyway. If you're on an older iPhone and haven't updated yet, it might be worth spending five minutes going through your home screens first and opening anything you haven't touched in a while, just so the loss is a choice and not a surprise. Or don't, and get your own little jolt on Wednesday morning like I did. Either way the flashlight app isn't coming back, and I've apparently replaced it with the Control Center toggle like a normal person should have been doing for the past three years.