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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, it seems that this requires all connected devices to be on the latest OS versions (iOS 16.2, macOS 13.1, etc.), which means you can’t use it as long as you have older devices connected to your Apple ID.

It also doesn’t work for Shared Albums, and for other “Shared” features it requires all participants to have ADP enabled.

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It's not particularly surprising that all your devices need to be updated, how else would it work? The whole point of E2E is that the ends are your devices.

Right, but it may be unexpected that a single device can prevent using a new feature on your other devices. This is just a heads up. And conceivably Apple could provide updates for older OS versions, as they sometimes do for security fixes.

This has been the case for other iCloud features and they've historically done a good job communicating this to the user at the time they upgrade the service and when they attempt to access it from an old device. I would expect that to follow the same process here either refusing to enable it until your devices are updated or having the old device kicked out until it's updated.

Yes, they are refusing to enable it if you have older devices signed in to your Apple ID.

>as long as you have older devices connected to your Apple ID

Is it possible to have an old device connected to Apple ID, Find My enabled and iCloud backups/sync disabled for ADP to work on your newer devices?

Having no backups/sync on the old devices is fine, presumably people who care about encryption have that turned off at the current state of matters anyway.

Probably not, because Apple doesn’t keep track centrally of which features you have enabled on which device, so they simply prevent you from activating the new feature when you have any signed-in device with an older OS version (which is something they do track).

I predict this will be possible

They already communicate to you when you use a newer iOS feature that won't work on your other device. But you can still use it. Maybe you won't be able to turn back on those features on the older device, or something

Which option makes Apple more money?

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