"All apps are up to date" - but they're not.

Hi, first a bit of a long story how I got to where I am now.

Hi,

Back in April, my phone died on me, and I was trying to find out if I could somehow get the data back.

Here is what happened, chronologically:

• First, any new pics I took showed up in thumbnails but when I opened them they were just gray.
• Second, my mail app started crashing whenever I opened it.
• Third, all my pictures disappeared, but if I refreshed my photo gallery a few times the library would start rebuilding and then crash again
• Fourth, Whatsapp crashed and when I re-opened it all the chat history was gone. To get it back from iCloud I had to delete Whatsapp and reinstall it. But I also had to sign out and back in to iCloud.
• Fifth, when I tried to reinstall Whatsapp it wouldn’t download from the app store. So I signed out of my Appstore account and signed back in, no luck. Changed my time to manual and back to auto, no luck. Some other things – no luck. So I tried ‘erase all settings’ as a final option.
• Sixth, after erasing all settings (just settings, not data), my phone did a restart… And got frozen in the startup, just showing a white screen with a black Apple logo.
• Went to the Apple store / Genius bar here, they got my phone into recovery mode but it came back with an error every time they tried to update it instead of restoring it. So they told me the only option is to restore it, erasing all data.

Now, months later, I tried using third party recovery software which actually helped, very happy with that.

So at least I managed to get my pictures back and quickly copied them to my pc.

Unfortunately, there is also some data in app that I want to recover, but the app needs to be updated before I can open it. So I go to the app store... And it says "All apps are up to date." - Even though they are not, because several apps have had updates since April.

I have tried signing in and out of my apple ID, I have tried resetting my phone, I have tried switching the date from manual to automatic, I have reset network setting, I have reset all settings, I have more than enough space on the phone, I have checked if I can update it through iTunes but I don't even see that option anymore in iTunes 12.6.2.20...

Anything else I could try? I have a new phone in the meantime but want to get my data from this app, so resetting to factory settings would not help with that.