Yes, 100%. In places where they get software residuals (agriculture and enterprise, via FlightHub and other services), development is constant because a team stays assigned to it.

I do think that in recent years DJI have gotten way better at budgeting for after-sales support on mainline products. The Mavic 3 series have gotten consistent and meaningful updates for quite some time now. This Virtual Flight app was always kind of a joke and I’m not really surprised it’s abandoned.

> Shouldn't they already factor in the cost of app support for the next X years when selling the product?

Depends what you mean by “should”. If you mean that they should because it would be the right thing to do, sure. If you mean it would be competitively advantageous, well I rather doubt it. Consumers have almost uniformly demonstrated that price trumps all.

Price and marketing. For better or worse[0], the consumers are putting trust into marketoids and their emotionally manipulative messaging, that focuses on imaginary nirvana-like experience, and completely omits how the experience is likely to look like a few months after purchase.

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[0] - Sadly, it's likely for better. The world after most people get an accurate feel for how much they can trust companies will be a very bad place to live in.

People were saying this in 1923 after the radio became popular.

And they were correct then and they're correct now.

I suspect some of this is why more recent DJI drones have an OS and screen on the controller, because that way they have a single set of hardware to target, and even if some future Android release breaks backwards compatibility they can simply choose not to update to it and the controller will still work.

I think hardware companies just view programmers as, like, EE that aren’t even trustworthy enough to put in charge of keeping the magic smoke in the chips.