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Starting Feb 1, new apps and app updates must be optimized for iOS 7

developer.apple.com

31–40 of 88 posts

Re: Starting Feb 1, new apps and app updates must be optimized for iOS 7

#31
post #15

The original ipad can only be upgraded to iOS 5.1.1, I think. There are a couple implications. First of all schools (like where my kids go) that bit the apple and deployed ipads to all the kids can't install or upgrade software after February. So if you're selling apps to kids, get your profits while you can. After february if they spend all their budget on upgrading ipads to the latest hardware so they could eventua…

  The TLDR is native iOS apps are going to die pretty soon.
I was with you until this. The segment of the education market that bought the 2010 iPad will indeed have some early-adopter problems, but in my experience working with a K-12 education startup, the vast majority of installed iPads in schools are iPad 2s.

Native iOS apps will die when iOS dies, which appears to be about as "soon" in tech industry time as the sun running out of helium.

Re: Starting Feb 1, new apps and app updates must be optimized for iOS 7

#32
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried http://downgradeios7.com/ ? I don't know if it really works, but I've heard that people have had luck going backwards — not sure how though.

What you've linked to is a scam. You can't unless you have an A4 device with an exploitable bootrom or SHSH blobs saved. You can't "downgrade" in a browser like that, it's completely impossible.

Thought so.

Wasn't there a Jailbreak that was available via Safari?

Re: Starting Feb 1, new apps and app updates must be optimized for iOS 7

#34
post #16

iOS 7 is the first Apple system where I felt royally screwed. My iPhone 4 became so slow as to be nearly unusable. Everything now takes seconds, swipes are being missed, even audio gets chopped up when I play back podcasts over bluetooth. There are two reasons for me to be angry about this: * Apple should never have released iOS 7 for iPhone 4 devices. iPhone 4 should have been listed as "unsupported". But had they d…

It's funny you mention this because that debate was fierce inside Apple itself, from what I have heard. They knew it ran like crap on an iPhone 4.

Re: Starting Feb 1, new apps and app updates must be optimized for iOS 7

#35
post #16

iOS 7 is the first Apple system where I felt royally screwed. My iPhone 4 became so slow as to be nearly unusable. Everything now takes seconds, swipes are being missed, even audio gets chopped up when I play back podcasts over bluetooth. There are two reasons for me to be angry about this: * Apple should never have released iOS 7 for iPhone 4 devices. iPhone 4 should have been listed as "unsupported". But had they d…

Agreed, with reservations. iPhone 4 itself was a grossly mis-executed product, though it wasn't obvious at the time.

The core issue is that the iPhone 4's CPU and GPU performance are only marginally better than the 3GS it replaced, but it pushes 4x the number of pixels around.

At the time we weren't really pushing the performance envelope, so everything appeared fine. Now we are - it's trivially easy to hit the upper bound of iPhone 4's performance envelope, whereas the 4S (and the 5, 5S) have a lot more wiggle room.

More critically for app and OS developers, the GPU performance on iPhone 4 was woefully inadequate for the number of pixels it's tasked to render. IIRC the iPhone 4's GPU has a fillrate (i.e., max pixels rendered per second) that's about 13% higher than the total number of pixels it has. This is to say, if you draw even a trivial amount of stuff in the background, you're going to start dropping frames.

For the 4S, 5, and 5S, the lack of CPU performance can often be made up by moving things to the GPU judiciously. On the 4 we don't even have that.

Here's where I disagree:

> "There is no good reason for iOS 7 to be slower than iOS 6. The "it requires more processing power for animations" reason is bogus"

Of course it is, but no one stated that the slowness is due to animations. A large part of the slowness comes from the "blur everything!" design of iOS7, which is inherently GPU-heavy, and thus performs very poorly on the iPhone 4 and its shittastic GPU.

The blur is everywhere, even (especially?) the stock apps where every tool bar and navigation bar blurs items behind itself. You may want to try turning the blur off: http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-turn-off-ios-7-blur-effects...

This really has little to do with optimization - iOS is on the whole a pretty performant OS and platform. This has everything to do with Apple deciding to include features that are beyond the performance envelope of a targeted device (or conversely, failing to drop support for a device when features move past its performance envelope).

Re: Starting Feb 1, new apps and app updates must be optimized for iOS 7

#36
post #20

Worth noting that first generation iPad, the current model until March 2011, will only run iOS 5.1.1 and has essentially been obsoleted by now. Yes, it is theoretically possible to support earlier versions but Apple makes it practically very awkward: around half of the top apps don't support iOS 5. Apple's own apps apparently don't support iOS 6.

Which makes it odd that 2011's iPad 2 is not only still supported, but still on sale.

Re: Starting Feb 1, new apps and app updates must be optimized for iOS 7

#37
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you've linked to is a scam. You can't unless you have an A4 device with an exploitable bootrom or SHSH blobs saved. You can't "downgrade" in a browser like that, it's completely impossible.

Thought so. Wasn't there a Jailbreak that was available via Safari?

That was Star - http://theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Star

It's a completely different process to a restore. Star used a PDF exploit to work it's way up to a kernel exploit allowing for the patching out of various protections which allowed for a jailbreak. You could not have used this exploit kit to restore an iPhone in the way this video claims to.

Re: Starting Feb 1, new apps and app updates must be optimized for iOS 7

#38
post #16

iOS 7 is the first Apple system where I felt royally screwed. My iPhone 4 became so slow as to be nearly unusable. Everything now takes seconds, swipes are being missed, even audio gets chopped up when I play back podcasts over bluetooth. There are two reasons for me to be angry about this: * Apple should never have released iOS 7 for iPhone 4 devices. iPhone 4 should have been listed as "unsupported". But had they d…

Pretty sure they purposely did it so it would slow down your "old" technology. I had the first iPhone that came out. As updates increased, the device's speed slowed.

Re: Starting Feb 1, new apps and app updates must be optimized for iOS 7

#39
post #33

What does that mean for third party applications? Like those built using Adobe Air, which as far as I'm concerned, does not use Xcode. Will an application that complies with the iOS 7 guideline be rejected just because it was not compiled under Xcode?

These tools will have to be updated to emit binaries with load commands that link against iOS 7 versions of UIKit in order to be in compliance. This is similar to the regulation change in March 2013 that mandated support for iPhone 5's larger display dimensions.

Re: Starting Feb 1, new apps and app updates must be optimized for iOS 7

#40
post #16

iOS 7 is the first Apple system where I felt royally screwed. My iPhone 4 became so slow as to be nearly unusable. Everything now takes seconds, swipes are being missed, even audio gets chopped up when I play back podcasts over bluetooth. There are two reasons for me to be angry about this: * Apple should never have released iOS 7 for iPhone 4 devices. iPhone 4 should have been listed as "unsupported". But had they d…

I'll second you opinions. What shocked me was the number of simply broken things.

The keyboard is unreliable, which is unforgivable; it would hang and catch up, or just miss key presses. Worse, the unlock screen would have a landscape keyboard sometimes, despite it never leaving portrait. I literally just rotate the phone while hitting the lock button until it straightens out. It's like resetting an Etch-A-Sketch.

And don't get me started on the home button's behavior. The face has a //single button// and it's unpredictable. No idea if it's alt-tabbing or showing desktop. I suspect there's subtle and clever timing going on, but with the system overloaded/out of memory (apps are constantly resetting), I suspect iOS 7 can't manage (yet).

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