Halfbrick forcing WP8 Fruit Ninja owners to rebuy the game by removing old app from the store

Halfbrick can be congratulated for updating Fruit Ninja to a higher performing and more polished new version, but it seems in the process they are robbing buyers of the old version who already purchased the app on Windows Phone.

A Windows Phone 8 owner reports when he discovered that he would have to re-purchase the new app (which he originally purchased on WP8), he tried to re-install the old app using the link in his purchase history, but ran into an error saying “This app is no longer available for your version of Windows Phone” since that version was now WP7 only.

Given that recent updates to the Windows Phone Store allows developers to serve multiple versions of their XAP to different platforms, the Halfbrick developer did not need to publish the new Fruit Ninja as a new app and could have avoided all these issues.

This effectively means if your purchased the app for $2.99, due to choices made by the developer you are now out of pocket with no app to show for it.

Microsoft needs to take responsibility for making sure Windows Phone users continue to have access to the apps they paid for, or compensate them for apps which have been removed from the store or made otherwise inaccessible.

Do our readers agree? Let us know below.

Thanks Irfan for the tip.