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Comment by l72 | Hacker News Reader

I have an ipad air sitting in my drawer right now that I haven't been able to use in years. It stopped getting major updates and stayed on iOS 12. It continued to get bug fix updates for the next few years, but that isn't really helpful when all the apps stopped supporting iOS 12.

No netflix, hulu, or HBO. I can't use it as a shopify terminal. Even if you are fine with an older version of these apps, these companies specifically disable their old apps, and make them stop working.

So...my ipad, which still has great battery life, sits in a drawer, because no apps work on it anymore. And I get it, that isn't 100% apples fault, these companies and their developers are to blame too, but apple certainly encourages targeting the latest versions os iOS.

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All the Apple stuff that shipped with it still should work. Safari, Music, Maps, etc. That's a lot of useful stuff.

I had an old iPod Touch that had stopped receiving updates years ago. Old third-party apps were a problem. But all the Apple-shipped stuff still worked - even stuff like Music and Maps, which required server-side support.

The basic issue is that, say, 8 year old hardware is still pretty functional in a lot of cases but that’s probably near the support limit of even fairly long-term OS and app support.

I’m mostly ok on a couple Macs because I really only use them as browsers anyway. But with iPads and iPhones they really become useless without updates after a while.

I’ve been using an iPhone X as a spare phone for travel but it finally stopped charging and I see it’s out of support so not worth fixing.

>The basic issue is that, say, 8 year old hardware is still pretty functional in a lot of cases but that’s probably near the support limit of even fairly long-term OS and app support

I's partly a consequence of forcing people to install so much software on these devices in the first place. Netflix is absolutely fine in the browser, as are 90% of all other apps. No need to create dependencies on a local OS, its oppressive rules and update cycles.

I get the advantages of native apps on PC and Mac, especially open source apps, because it really gives you more control over the software you run. But on mobile, especially on iOS, you have no control anyway.

Re: “consequence of forcing people”, who is doing the “forcing” in your scenario and how is that force applied?

Netflix is doing the forcing. Banks are doing the forcing. There are many app categories with very little reason to exist at all, or at least not for creating dependencies on the latest client APIs.

Edit:

And it's not just that these apps are useless. In some cases they are inferior to the web app.

E.g., the Netflix iPad app can't seem to remember where I left off. It misses entire episodes. And every evening when I try to resume watching, I'm getting an error message because the old network connection is broken. Everything that's good about Netflix happens on the server. The app is just a dumb terminal and it can't even serve that purpose properly.

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