Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

developer.apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–88 of 88 posts

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

#81

Post by [deleted] »

dak1 wrote: post #28
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…

As an iPhone 4 owner and longtime Apple owner (owned a Mac since 1988 when I was 5 years old and typing this on a 15" rMBP) I wholeheartedly agree. It's really beyond shocking how badly the iPhone 4 works with iOS7 as compared to iOS6. I'm not sure it can really be adequately explained - you just have to try it for yourself. Even switching to the camera from the lock screen is nearly impossible at times. I've recentl…

[deleted]

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

#82

Post by lostlogin »

dak1 wrote: post #80
lostlogin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a heavy app user - stock apps and one or 2 others I only. With this in mind, there was very little wrong with my ios7 experience. Sure, it wasn't as fast as I wanted, but it wasn't a particular concern. I wonder if this is a higher tolerance from me, or a difference in how our devices were working.

Do you have an iPhone 4? My girlfriend got an iPhone 5S and it has no performance issues in iOS 7.

Yes. It is still in regular use on ios7. I have recently got a 5s and while it's better, the regular safari crashes/quit to home screen aren't great.

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

#83

Post by josephlord »

MBCook wrote: post #78
josephlord wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? The 4S was selling but I don't think that the 4 was.

The iPhone 5 was the newest, at $200. The 4s was the 'one year back' and was $99. The lowest end was the iPhone 4, which was free on contract. I found an article on CNet from March 21st that mentioned the deal: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57575621-94/should-i-take-t...

I stand corrected, have an upvote.

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

#84

Post by JScarry »

tannerc wrote: post #30
CookWithMe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App optimized for iOS 7 != App only runs on iOS 7 In most cases, the developer just has to recompile the app and include iOS 7. Of course it get's a lot more tricky if one wants to start using new APIs introduced in iOS 7, and that's why most devs will drop support for older versions.

This needs to be highlighted more here. Support for iOS 7 can complicate things, but for -- I'd estimate -- 75%+ of developers it's simply tweaking a few things and then releasing an app that continues to support v5.0 and up at the very least. This isn't as dramatic an announcement as some are making it out to be. Though maybe it should be, as the way to encourage both consumers and developers to stay up-to-date is t…

Agreed. It takes a while to figure out what iOS7 breaks in your app, but there are plenty of resources out there that tell you exactly how to fix all of the problems. Sliding content under the top menu was the big one for me, but it’s a one line fix. (Or three if you like your if statements on multiple lines.) Turning off the bright colors for links and buttons is another one liner. It was probably less than 20 lines of code and a day’s work to update my apps.

There are a bunch of new features that I’m adding. I especially like the ability to speak text with a Siri-like voice.

I think my interfaces fit into the iOS7 ecosystem, but until they start enforcing the policy on Feb 1, I won’t really know. Figuring out what the rules really mean is always a big unknown in the app review process.

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

#85

Post by lstamour »

mikeash wrote: post #29
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…

My copy of Xcode 5 supports Mac OS X deployment targets back to 10.4. Presumably the only reason it doesn't go any farther than that is because nothing prior to 10.4 ran on Intel, and Xcode doesn't ship PowerPC compilers these days. On the iOS side, my copy of Xcode 5 supports deployment targets back to iOS 4.3. I think that may be similar to the reason for stopping at 10.4, but with ARMv6/7 instead of PowerPC/Intel.

The hard part is finding a device that can run 4.3 for testing. Technically, you could launch an app that supports iOS 2 or 3 all the way to iOS 7, the hardship is testing! Unlike Android post-Froyo, Apple's emulators have never been that accurate. in both cases, memory and device limits on older hardware become the significant bottlenecks.

That and with every OS X update you lose another simulator major version each year. Typing from memory, so I could be wrong: 10.6 had everything. 10.7 lost 3.x, 10.8 lost 4.x and 10.9 lost 5.x simulation. I had to install VMs to run emulators, how sad is that?

All this would be fine if Apple allowed developers to downgrade as post-Xcode 5 hinted, an option removed when the jail breaking started.

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

#86

Post by Terretta »

jwr wrote: post #70
potatolicious wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hig…

> 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.

Sounds like your phone's borked in some way.

That happens to me sometimes (1 in 10?) when bringing in legacy settings on to a new device.

I've helped upgrade several 4 (not 4s) users and they're happy. On all of them I turned off motion, turned off blur, turned off background updates, turned off auto music/app/updates downloads.

If a phone still has slowness, it's usually a bad setting brought forward. Seems to usually be in email or network settings.

I delete email accounts, reset network settings, and recreate email accounts, leaving iCloud as Push and all others as Fetch, Manual.

If that doesn't fix, I try again, this time "Erase all settings". (Not Content and settings.)

These are the same steps I use to get back battery life losses. Something goes wrong, runs in background, kills batt and slows phone.

Finally, one friend has Downcaster and always ends up with a full phone. Below a level of free memory the device definitely slows drastically. Touch and wait kind of slow, less than 2GB on 64GB device is noticeable, less than 500MB get to be a real problem.

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

#87

Post by mikeash »

lstamour wrote: post #85
mikeash wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My copy of Xcode 5 supports Mac OS X deployment targets back to 10.4. Presumably the only reason it doesn't go any farther than that is because nothing prior to 10.4 ran on Intel, and Xcode doesn't ship PowerPC compilers these days. On the iOS side, my copy of Xcode 5 supports deployment targets back to iOS 4.3. I think that may be similar to the reason for stopping at 10.4, but with ARMv6/7 instead of PowerPC/Intel.

The hard part is finding a device that can run 4.3 for testing. Technically, you could launch an app that supports iOS 2 or 3 all the way to iOS 7, the hardship is testing! Unlike Android post-Froyo, Apple's emulators have never been that accurate. in both cases, memory and device limits on older hardware become the significant bottlenecks. That and with every OS X update you lose another simulator major version each…

When did Apple hint at being able to downgrade devices?

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

#88

Post by lstamour »

mikeash wrote: post #87
lstamour wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hard part is finding a device that can run 4.3 for testing. Technically, you could launch an app that supports iOS 2 or 3 all the way to iOS 7, the hardship is testing! Unlike Android post-Froyo, Apple's emulators have never been that accurate. in both cases, memory and device limits on older hardware become the significant bottlenecks. That and with every OS X update you lose another simulator major version each…

When did Apple hint at being able to downgrade devices?

In Xcode. http://wiki.canby.k12.or.us/groups/ipodusergroup/wiki/a507f/...

Until recently, Xcode always offered a (non-functional since iOS 4 or so) way to downgrade your device.

Now, they didn't document it as such, but why else would you make a menu that shows only past versions of an OS and let's you "Restore" such a release? ;-)

Post reply on HN