Discontinued items are the result of low sales in the Apple AppStore. The efforts for maintaining such items is not wroth keeping it up-to-date any longer.
Such items automatically will become switched off and removed from active sales by Apple, even if the software is working and even does not require any update.
We will not update items, that do not get a significant support from the users, if the sales are under a certain threshold. So go, repeat, sucking something new (and possibly cheap and even free) – until it gets removed by Apple, because it’s not selling like the usual junk…
But the DNA of such discontinued items still may be of use in our new developments and appear in future releases as evolutionary building blocks.