Software development in the age of mobile requires continuous development. Who is going to pay for development of new features?

I mean, that's all fine and well. Just don't sell products then take them away after because you can. Imagine buying physical goods and having the business owner come to your house and take it away because it was costing them too much. Insanity.

So should they be obligated to keep supporting their servers forever?

The better analogy would be like me expecting NordicTrack to service my exercise equipment for free forever. They aren’t going to take my physical equipment away. But they also aren’t going to keep sending me replacement parts and service techs out anytime I call them unless I keep paying the annual warranty.

And before anyone replies that it must be shoddy equipment to keep needing repairs, heavily used exercise equipment constantly has moving parts that wear down.

I think you're missing my point. I don't mind that they switched to a subscription service, I fucking hate being lied to. Given that they eventually came around to grandfathering the purchasers (who I guess had to go click a button somewhere), they obviously knew they were wrong on that front.

Don't sell products then change them afterwards. I paid for a thing. Then they made it so that the thing I purchased required more payment indefinitely. That's bullshit.

Yes, they are obligated because that's what a lifetime subscription means even if they added snotty fine print in a EULA.

And what court is going to force them to run servers forever and keep updating the software?

Federal courts, and probably state courts.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising#United_State...

And the federal court is going to force a provider never to shut down a service?

You can't Socrates your way into a philosophical win here, especially by repeating the same tapped vein of questions. A bait-and-switch of lifetime service for a fee to a monthly service for a fee for the same feature set is not some precedent setting benchmark nor a useful time spent arguing on the internet about. Some people are rightfully still upset by the switch. Let me suggest we move on since you've not realized we can agree to disagree yet.

I think you were absent when this happened years ago.

Part of their marketing was “No subscription fees” and the premium was marketed as “lifetime”.

It was a pretty big bait-and-switch and the r/PocketCasts is a good example of bad customer relations.