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It gets worse. Even if you could download an old version of Firefox and Chrome to your iOS device, they'd have the same problem as Safari, because Apple bans third party browser engines. Firefox and Chrome for iOS are essentially wrappers on a Safari core.

Yes, I forgot about this. It does make it worse! I've commented this elsewhere, too: the incompatibility problem is still anti-user, it affected me when trying to download other types of apps that have nothing to do with browsers.

> My conclusion: the onus is on the device manufacturers to not arbitrarily restrict their users. Jim Nielsen's mom's iPad is perfectly capable of opening that website, but its manufacturers are limiting it artificially.

No, it's not. Firefox and Chrome on iOS both use the operating system's Safari engine. (I mean, yeah, the hardware would support running a more recent browser engine, so your point still holds.)

You're right: I forgot that ultimately it's Safari anyway. But this happened to me with several other apps, too, such as Garage Band, some synthesizer apps, even a guitar tuner wouldn't work on a completely capable device that's now basically useless!

2017? I think you have that wrong, the newest iPad no longer getting updates is the iPad mini 3 which was sold from Fall 2014-2015.

It's a 2nd generation iPad Pro. The Internet says I should be able to upgrade to iPadOS 15.2, but the device won't give me any updates and it's running iOS 10.

Maybe the update function in iOS 10 has stopped working for some reason? You could try updating it with iTunes (or via Finder on newer macOS versions).

Weird. I'd check to see if a beta profile is installed (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203282), if that doesn't work then use a Mac or PC to update it.

Thanks for the suggestions!

I've got a first gen iPad pro, running 15.1 currently. (Incidentally: thanks for letting me know 15.2 was out, I'm updating now).

This seems like a pretty poor implementation on Apple's app store's handling of out of date app installation. I believe there is a workaround where you can use an online version of the app store to first trigger an app download to your iphone, which would then transition it into that "re-download from cloud" state which lets you get an older version.

I've successfully installed an ancient version of iTunes for Windows to associate apps to my account and that method worked for a while, until Youtube pulled support for the version of the Youtube app that the old iPad I got used last. The web player is dog slow, so the iPad is pretty much a fancy glass eBook reader now.

There's actually another (terribly convoluted) way to "purchase" apps, with another computer and an old version of iTunes[0]. This version of iTunes supports searching for and purchasing apps, so it can be used to get the license for apps. I used it to get Spotify working on my 2012 iPad, installing iTunes on Linux with WINE.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208079

Which reminds me to ask - is anyone making a custom OS for iDevices yet? Something like Graphene for iOS? I know about Asahi Linux, but that's for M1 laptops, AFAIK. (Because the "right" solution here is clearly to ditch the OS and install something Linux-y, and then whatever software you need, including recent Chrome).

Same question for ChromeOS devices.

There are ongoing attempts at running Android on old iDevices, but I doubt they'll ever be as good as custom roms on normal Android hardware.

The iPad released in 2017 is the 5th generation which can get iOS 15. Perhaps it was an earlier iPad?