Constructive Criticism iTunes Updates Apps to Incompatible Versions

I'm a big fan of my iOS devices, from my family's 3 iPhones to our now-antique iPad 1.  I've done what I consider to be a great job juggling the multiple ids and accounts necessary to function well in the iTunes, Primary iCloud (for family Find iPhone), Secondary iCloud (for backups), iMessage, Facetime, and Gamecenter architecture, mainly by following the instructions here.

I think it's a little overcomplicated, but it works, so I'm happy.

I'm less happy with how purchased apps occasionally disappear from the cloud once they are no longer sold, but I keep a local copy of all app purchases in my iTunes folder so that little annoyance has only come back to bite me once, and Apple compensated me for my $0.99 loss with a $1.29 song.  I even back up my local iTunes folder to network-attached storage every few weeks to make doubly sure that I don't lose anything.  I would argue that it costs Apple nothing to maintain Cloud copies of cancelled apps for paying customers, but there's probably some sort of arrangement with app providers that prevents that.

I'm responsible for backing up my data, though, so I'm okay with that.

What I'm not okay with is that iTunes recently, at some point, updated a couple of apps to versions that no longer run on my iPad 1.  Since I infrequently plug my iPad into my desktop, I didn't notice this until a few months later, after those updated versions had propagated onto my backups.  Now I'm in the odd situation of having an unbackupable copy of an app on my iPad.  Perhaps there's a way of extracting it via some method which would violate the TOS.  Perhaps (as some droll commenter will surely point out) I shouldn't bank on Apple supporting obsolete hardware and I should just go out and buy a new iPad. 

But Apple is surely aware that there are millions of folks out there with iPad 1s who are already in the unfortunate position of not being able to upgrade to iOS 6.  By overwriting my perfectly good local copy of an app with an "updated" one that no longer runs on my hardware, I now longer have a local backup of my own data that runs on my present hardware.  Provided my iPad never needs to be wiped and refreshed, that's not a problem, but should that happen, I'll lose my app for good with no recourse.  Perhaps this is the price we pay for playing in the iOS architecture, where websites like oldversions are useless when new versions of software cripple old functionality, but it shouldn't have to be this way.

Anyway, as long as there are multiple devices out there running apps purchased in the App Store, for apps which are still currently available, I think it would behoove Apple to keep available at least the latest version that runs on each platform, to keep this sort of issue from disappointing customers.  At the minimum, a flag in iTunes to prevent the download of software which will no longer run on owned hardware should be implemented.

Thanks for reading,

-S