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Comment by jellyksong | Hacker News Reader

The actual iOS app seems pretty buggy at the moment. Many of the ratings are exceedingly negative.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/minecraft-reality/id57799155...

"Note: Not supported for iPod Touch 4G or earlier. Most functionality is not available on iPhone 4."

... with many negative comments from iPhone 4 users who ignored that note. The video looked so good compared to Layar on Android - is the hardware in the iPhone 5 "better" for AR somehow? Or is the video just picking the best case scenarios?

That note is rather disingenuous considering the requirements on the left hand side state: "Compatible with iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (4th generation)"

That's because Apple doesn't have support for flagging specific devices. You can't for example click check boxes that enable an app to be downloaded for iphone 5 and iphone 4s but not iphone4. There are a variety of clever tricks you can use in some but not all cases. For example you can require a front facing camera to eliminate ipad1 but not ipad2.

Unfortunately such tricks don't give devs complete coverage. It's a major issue that many devs struggle with. Apple is entirely at fault here for not supporting a very straight forward feature.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. Seems rather ridiculous considering the marked difference between devices.

I'm not an iPhone developer, but from my perspective this looks like a big problem for all apps that release products and/or updates only compatible with newer iPhones. These products/updates almost always warn the user in the descriptions, but these apps seem to always get flamed in comments and ratings anyways.

To the iOS devs out there:

* Have you run into this problem, and if so is this as frustrating as it seems?

* Why can't/wont Apple create a better system for this?

The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that this is an awkwardly passive aggressive method of incentivizing all apps to be backwards compatible. Surely it can't be ignorance to this developer need, right?

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