Similar with Tweetbot, which seems to release a new version as a separate app every couple years or so? The version I reluctantly bought (knowing they do this) is no longer updated but had long-standing bugs even when it was being actively developed. The experience makes me reluctant to buy any apps at all on App Store, tbh.
You pay $5 for Tweetbot, and they work delivering updates for years before asking for another (usually b/c of many new features or hard work updating the UI for modern iOS)
It's one of the most polished apps around. You don't owe the Developer's time indefinitely from one $5 purchase, and you're free to move to an alternative. I'm happy to continue to support the apps I love -- they generally aren't asking a whole lot.
Additionally, in the case of Twitter clients, they also can't add a lot of new customers b/c Twitter has capped their allowed clients. If they didn't charge customers again, they wouldn't be able to sustain the work with new ones.
Same thing with WeightBot, which I have been using for years and now doesn't work with iOS 11, and I'm losing years of data. I would pay for an update to the app, but it's completely abandoned.
I also loved weightbot, but gave up on it long ago. You might be able to pull the data off with one of the filesystem, readers, if that's worth anything to you at all.