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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

#61

Post by drp4929 »

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?

No, it does not mean only build for iOS onwards.

It means give primary focus to iOS7 in terms of performance, UI, design idioms, usage of underlying technologies etc….

It means don't build apps targeting prior iOS and just reply upon backward compatibility of iOS7. Use iOS7 as your main target OS.

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

#62

Post by MBCook »

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…

Remember they were still selling the iPhone 4 up until the day the released the 5s and 5c.

It would be very un-Apple-y for an OS to drop support for a product you were selling 2 days ago.

I'm sure that's why it was done. You're probably right that the 4 didn't have the GPU to support it and that from a technical perspective it didn't make much sense.

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

#64

Post by MBCook »

frou_dh wrote: post #36
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.

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

There are two reasons. First, the original iPad was somewhat underpowered. There is a reason the iPad 2 felt so much faster.

The second reason is because of the iPad mini. The non-retina Mini is an iPad 2, just in a smaller package.

I know some developers were complaining after the retina Mini was announced because Apple didn't update the non-retina version to the A7, so the effectively still have to support the iPad 2.

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

#65

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#66

Post by rbritton »

HCIdivision17 wrote: post #40
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'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. An…

The keyboard is the same on the iPad 4, which at the time of the iOS 7 release was the newest model iPad. I get typos all of the time due to it missing key presses or hanging.

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

#67

Post by jarjoura »

A few things people might be missing from this announcement.

1) Simply recompiling an application with iOS 7 SDK unlocks a different set of view metrics and subtle behaviors that are non-trivial to address. Developers need to make sure views lay out properly (accounting for the status bar, etc.) in both iOS 7 and iOS 5/6.

2) If you're a game company, chances are you can set your target device to iOS 5 and after making sure you account for the metrics changes you should be fine.

3) Clang/LLVM changes might cause a new crash when run on iPad 1, for example, because Apple won't be testing it anymore. You'll need to have this hardware around to verify everything runs if you want to support that device.

4) If the application is rarely updated or barely maintained, chances are it will be abandoned at this point. What used to be a simple bug fix here and there will now become a massive project.

5) Last and most important point, most software that IS maintained, or at least downloaded enough to warrant concern, I promise you that Apple's developer relations has a point person on top of it. All of your games and important tool makers are well aware of their need to transition to the new SDK if they haven't already. Perhaps a bug in 7.0 that will be fixed in 7.1 was keeping them from releasing an update.

5.1) If you have a game that is used on iPad 1, speak up and let the developer know so that they can make a decision to keep supporting it. OpenGL ES has been quite stable API-wise for quite some time so I suspect most games will continue to support iOS 5 for the foreseeable future.

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

#68

Post by awj »

dragonwriter wrote: post #55
awj wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GPs claim was about the 5s, not the 5 or 5c, so I'm not how your reference to your experience on the 5 or the similarity between the 5 and 5c is supposed to rebut it.

I took the "there's no way back to iOS6" to mean that they'd run it on the phone before, which would mean they were on a 5. Thanks, Apple, for these wonderfully ambiguous names.

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

#69

Post by jbrooksuk »

jbrooksuk wrote: post #19
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…

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.

Sorry, I didn't know this was a scam. Stop with the downvotes.

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

#70

Post by jwr »

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…

I disagree with this reasoning. The number of pixels to be pushed around did not change from iOS 6 to iOS 7. It's still the same. The fancy graphics effects are reduced already by default, and you can reduce them even further. My phone doesn't do visibly anything different from what it did under iOS 6. And yet it is much, much slower.

I already did everything that the article you quoted suggests. My phone runs in high-contrast, super-accessibility, no-fx-please mode. And performance still sucks.

To give you an example: I sometimes press power-on, nothing happens for a second or two. Then I press the home button and after another two-three seconds I get… a screenshot, just as if both buttons were pressed simultaneously. Number of pixels, blur, seriously? We haven't even gotten to displaying the lock screen yet!

I still believe there is lots that can be optimized, but Apple chose not to do it. It wasn't laziness, it was a business decision — their time is better spent implementing new stuff — but that is a decision I disagree with. Or, more precisely — I disagree with this decision given that they called iPhone 4 "supported".

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