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Comment by sgt | Hacker News Reader

This is disappointing. I just purchased the app and it opened, but I got an error: https://imgur.com/a/6MKVqq4

Edit - I saw in "Settings" screen that there is no support for iPhone XS and that I need to request a refund. I've done that now.

Luckily Apple makes it super easy to get refunds!

I'm excited to try the app once it starts working on my device.

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Sorry to waste your time, I don't know how to block iPhone X/Xr/Xs and other devices with chips below A13.

Do you specifically need A13? There's a UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities that goes in your Info.plist for "phone-ipad-minimum-performance-a12", but not one for exactly A13…

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/in...

Yes, I didn't know that I could set "phone-ipad-minimum-performance-a12" when I first developed it, so I was not allowed to add this restriction to the next version (Apple thought it would prevent some users who had downloaded it before from using it), but this restriction still includes the iPhone X series, so I had to remind them in the app users.

I don't know if your app just runs slowly on A12 and lower or if it doesn't run at all. But if it's the latter, perhaps you could detect the UIDevice().type on start and show an alert explaining the situation to the users?

I would also consider putting this information to the very top of the description to try to avoid bad reviews.

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One more feedback: I struggled to find the App Store link in your blog article. I would definitely recommend using Apple's well known marketing badge[0], you can still enhance it with your brand if you want to.

Congrats on the app and good luck!

[0] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/marketing/guidelines/

Wow so if I understand correctly: you’ll need to allow downloads from those phones forever, because of a small number of initial downloads? That’s quite an App Store policy

apps usually introduce requirements based on software versions, which eventually will exclude hardware

It seems a little strange that it doesn't work for the A12, it could be a performance issue, if the UI doesn't update for a set amount of time, an app will crash out, this can be solved by putting the offending blocking code to a background thread and adding an activity indicator to the main thread until the job is done.

Some users will crash while building the index, some build the index normally, but the search results are the same for any search term.

I can't remember what the timeout value is, but say the A12 puts some users on the limit, say due to library size. That could be the issue.

(I'm sorry, I haven't dowloaded the app so I'm guessing on your UI, just know its a fairly common mistake) If you're just putting up a dialog saying "building index", running the code to build the index in the same thread, then dismissing once done, it will lock out UI updates, eventually leading to a crash (I think it's 30 secs for the timeout).

Running code in a high priority background thread with a callback to the main thread is fairly trivial in iOS, there's the fine grained control of GCD, Combine for react like code, and the new async/await pattern.

A UIActivityIndicator can be used to show activity without knowing progress.

Thank you for letting me know about this case, I will check it out :)

No worries, I will use this as an excuse to buy a new iPhone 14 Pro or similar. Been needing an app like this for years.

The website clearly states the requirements:

- iOS 16.0 or above

- iPhone 11 (A13 chip) or later models

That’s not how it work for mobile platforms. Developers usually set the targets correctly, so incompatible devices can’t install the app, rather than relying on the users to read some text in some website (not appstore where they install it).

While true, is there a way to achieve this?

AFAIK you cannot set arbitrary compatible devices. You can only set UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities, which are quite limited[0]. There is a required capability for `iphone-ipad-minimum-performance-a12`, but not for A13.

And also if you already have the app in the App Store, you can only relax these requirements. You cannot add new ones as that could prevent users who already bought the app from launching it.

BTW the minimum requirements are listed in Queryable's App Store description as well, although I would consider putting them on the very top.

[0] - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/in...

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