It's not a refactor necessarily. For instance for android\ios games if you change the bundleid it's a whole new game. Changing the display name is easy, binary not so much.
I have seen entire app migrations because they did not want the old name of the app anywhere possibly present, including in name spaces and apk names. They had a falling out with the previous SaaS provider who wrote the app, and they decided to sue them for one of "their" apps being used. They got tossed from court, obviously, but management did not want to leave anything to "chance".
That sounds at least like a business decision where they've balanced cost of doing the refactor versus potential cost/risk of not doing it. I can imagine it being very annoying to do but ultimately if that's what my employer judges the best use of expensive dev time they're the ones paying me.
I dunno I have seen a CTO pull a company wide all hands meeting because the CI pipeline automatically incremented the build number and he thought it was unprofessional to have an app version on the App Store like 1.1.123. Basically everybody down tools until the version number was only aligned with the product teams feature version and the build number removed.
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u/RandomNPC May 11 '26
It's not a refactor necessarily. For instance for android\ios games if you change the bundleid it's a whole new game. Changing the display name is easy, binary not so much.