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

developer.apple.com

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

#41

Post by rbritton »

surreal wrote: post #9
kevingadd wrote: post #2

Doesn't requiring the new build pipeline plus 'optimized for iOS 7', mean you can't support most older iOS devices anymore? I know that is how the build pipeline stuff worked for desktop OS X apps - they tended to deprecate the ability to build for older OS versions when you installed the latest rev of XCode. If so, how far back does it go? Like, if I compile an iOS7 optimized app, will it work on iOS6 devices? What…

iOS apps in Xcode have a "Base SDK" (which is the actual SDK you're building against: must be iOS 7.0 from Feb 1). But you then also set a "deployment target", which is effectively the oldest version of iOS you still want to support. Set this to iOS 6, for example, and you'll be supporting both versions, even after Feb 1. One of course needs to be careful about using new APIs/features in this situation (detect whethe…

There's an OS X app I found not too long ago that helps immensely with checking the deployment target against the actual APIs used in order to make sure you correctly avoid unavailable stuff: http://www.deploymateapp.com

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

#42

Post by drham »

ronaldx wrote: 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.

Apple does at least allow download of the last compatible version for iOS apps.

Unfortunately this also puts developers in a really tough spot if they have a large number of iPad (or other users of obsolete devices) as they are unable to ship updates to that obsolete version and they are forced to either disable this download completely abandoning the customers or have it available and be unable to make any bugfixes or other updates

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

#43

Post by pilsetnieks »

potatolicious wrote: post #35
jwr wrote: 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…

Blur is off by default on the iPhone 4 already, as well as a number of other resource intensive features and effects:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/new-lease-on-life-or-de...

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

#44

Post by jbrooksuk »

nwh wrote: post #37
jbrooksuk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah thanks!

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

#45

Post by awj »

nwh wrote: post #21
jwr wrote: 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…

If it's any consolation, it's bad on an iPhone 5s too. I get constant crashes, animation glitches that need a reboot to fix, it's just unusable and there's no way back to iOS6. I've used it on an iPhone 4, and I don't know how anybody copes. It feels like my 3G was on 4.2.1.

I've had it on the iPhone 5 since iOS7 released and have seen none of these issues. Not sure it's appropriate to claim that your experience is representative, especially since hardware-wise the 5 and 5c are practically identical.

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

#46

Post by kenrikm »

mildtrepidation wrote: post #3
kevingadd wrote: post #2

Doesn't requiring the new build pipeline plus 'optimized for iOS 7', mean you can't support most older iOS devices anymore? I know that is how the build pipeline stuff worked for desktop OS X apps - they tended to deprecate the ability to build for older OS versions when you installed the latest rev of XCode. If so, how far back does it go? Like, if I compile an iOS7 optimized app, will it work on iOS6 devices? What…

I'm also interested in the answer to this. Building for Android allows you to target a wide range of versions even if your build target is the latest; is there any analogue to this in the iOS world?

You can use:

if ([object respondsToSelector:@selector(selectorYoureCalling:)]) { //it Does! }

To check if the iOS version your app is installed on has the method and then use it if it does. It's pretty easy to keep things backwards compatible as long as you add fallbacks for functionality that's not present it older versions.

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

#47

Post by thatthatis »

jwr wrote: 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'm still on iOS 5 so I can keep diving directions from google. Based on what you're saying, I never want to upgrade.

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

#48

Post by smweber »

tonyhb wrote: post #13
andrewgjohnson wrote: post #4

I think the lack of definition of "iOS 7 optimized" is what is confusing to those of us who haven't developed apps on iOS.

Yeah, I was thinking that as a web/java developer I don't understand what this means. Does this mean that, essentially, we only build for iOS 7 onwards?

"iOS 7 Optimized" is Apple's way of saying "built with the iOS 7 SDK".

Apps that are built for iOS 7 get the new shiny keyboard and some different behaviour when run on iOS 7, but can still run fine on older versions of iOS if the app developer is willing to support older versions of iOS. This is done by setting an option called "deployment target" to an older iOS version when building in Xcode (and testing a ton on older versions of iOS, and not calling newer APIs on versions of iOS that don't support them).

So this announcement means Apple is dropping support for older versions of Xcode (with older iOS SDKs), but older versions of iOS are still technically supported as long as you're building with the iOS 7 SDK.

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

#49

Post by jkubicek »

thatthatis wrote: post #47
jwr wrote: 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'm still on iOS 5 so I can keep diving directions from google. Based on what you're saying, I never want to upgrade.

Have you tried Google Maps for iOS? It's fantastic and more than makes up for any regressions in the stock app.

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

#50

Post by wvenable »

thatthatis wrote: post #47
jwr wrote: 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'm still on iOS 5 so I can keep diving directions from google. Based on what you're saying, I never want to upgrade.

Google maps run on iOS6 and iOS7. It's probably quite a bit better than the iOS 5 version.

I'm on iOS 6 (jailbroken) but my whole family is on iOS 7 -- and so far I'm happy I haven't upgraded. Because of iOS 7, I'm considering making the switch to Android for my next phone.

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