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Comment by jws | Hacker News Reader

Your app vendors are making their business decisions. They can hit 98% of customers by coding with the modern, feature rich, man hour efficient APIs. The short tail of early model iPads in use don’t justify the larger expense to develop and test using the older APIs.

Apple doesn’t say it out loud, but they can’t just decide to support the new iOS versions on the first few versions of hardware. There just isn’t enough processing power there to deliver a respectable user experience with the new software. Sure, it worked fine when new, but as processor cycles got more plentiful, they still all got used by programmers.

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* one site is showing 98% of users running iOS 12 or higher.

* just 0.1% are stuck at iOS 6.

* the site: http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/template_

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My problem isn't that new stuff stopped being developed. It's that old stuff that previously worked is now broken. Supposedly, the app store will keep track of versions and let you download the "last known good" version for your hardware. Unfortunately, many devs released updates that claimed to work on hardware that it didn't actually work on. I had a program that got an update, and suddenly wouldn't work because it now required a "front facing camera" on hardware that had no such camera. They overwrote the "last known good" version for my hardware, so there was no way to go back. Even if they don't actively develop and support things on the old hardware, how about just not screwing it up for people?

My Macbook Air just went out of OS support, and apps have already started to bitrot. My iPhone just went out of iOS support, so it's just a matter of time before I start getting "bad" updates that wreck my stuff. My iPad and iPod touch went out of support years ago, and the only thing that still worked consistently was 2 magazine subscriptions on the iPad...which broke sometime in August 2019.

How much effort is it to keep the digital lifeline services still working, so that I can continue to use paid-for content and apps? I know it's greater than 0, but I went from being a dedicated Apple user to one who will never buy another Apple product. Every single previous purchase has resulted in pristine and perfectly functioning hardware being rendered useless by loss online support services. If I can't update on my schedule and my budget, I can't justify buying the hardware.

App creators are given an API and ways not to break support for your device; it’s on them to do device testing of all their app’s corner cases. This doesnt seem unreasonable to me. What else should apple do?

Why not let the user download any old version? Let the users mark newer versions as broken for their hardware, so that the last-known-working-version is not reset?

I mean, they have a platform, but the feedback loop seems kind of broken.

Apple can share the blame, because they didn't test the app like they should have to verify that the app was in fact compatible with the hardware the dev claimed. Or maybe the dev did everything right, but Xcode had a bug.

But mainly, just let me download whatever previous version I want.

Maybe Apple doesn't have a spare iPad just lying around; they're hoping that the devs have bought all their extras, to test software updates in different platforms...

You can go into the App Store settings and disable auto-updating. Seems like that could fix the issue for you?

One used to be able to back up apps directly to Mac or PC via iTunes but it seems like that ability was lost in 2018, now that I search for it.

For Macs, it’s still easy. Use time machine and if an app updates to a bad version you can just restore the earlier .app file from your time machine.

Meanwhile, Nokia N900 is still a capable device with new software releases being developed for it (like Devuan-based Maemo Leste or Alpine-based postmarketOS).

I’m consistent stunned at how a community built around tech startups cannot understand these business trade offs. People talk about mvps and happy paths and growth hacking but can’t understand how a business could look at some niche use case and say “yeah that deserves total support.”

Keeping stuff working across updates is a niche use case?

But, Apple is going above and beyond to coerce users into needlessly updating. I was actually forced to update my iPad because I forgot my pin[1].

Everything Apple has done has had the effect of slowly bricking your iPad, bit by bit.

And these so called "upgrades" have only had the effect of removing features and slowing my device, and generally degrading the UX. This is not ok.

I never actually purchased my iPad, it was given to me to develop medical software. And even though it was used in a closed offline environment, this forced update still broke things and set back our development. I also know a teacher who was forced to shelve her lessons after she was tricked into updating her iPad 4 to iOS 11, which had so much latency when typing that it was rendered virtually useless.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986500

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