I have a .app domain for my email, and have had it since like 2018. Now I'm wondering if that was a mistake.
UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
There is a mixed history of what happens to the ccTLD in such cases.
If the UK loses control of it, I'd put most of my betting money on Option 3: The new owners extort everyone with a .io domain for a rate proportional to the perceived value. In other words, $50K a year for a successful tech company, $1000 a year for the average joe who doesn't want to lose control of a domain tied to 1,000 accounts.
I would occasionally check it, and the price would vary by hundreds of dollars, but never a price I was willing to pay. Eventually I think it lapsed again and was picked up by some Chinese site that (I think) was trying to sell massages.
Finally, in 2021, I guess they got tired of paying for it, and it fully lapsed, and I was able to purchase it, so I bought it for ten years.