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Comment by fnayr | Hacker News Reader

The real story here is not the UDID ban which we knew was coming (and is easily counter-able as demonstrated in the comments already), but the forced iPhone 5 support.

Now this wouldn't be an issue except that Apple doesn't allow you to support the iPhone 5 without targeting iOS 4.3 or higher. So this kills off support for iOS 3.1.3-4.2. This might not seem like such a bad thing, but if you're targeting certain demographics like kids (as I am), it cuts off a significant percentage (7% in my case) of users.

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Apparently, with the lipo tool, you can still support iOS below version 4.3 and Apple won't reject it.

See: http://stackoverflow.com/a/12678077

Whoa! Thanks for this! I would edit my original comment if it let me.

Still it is a hack that Apple could start disallowing at any time.

I don't think the lipo tool will ever be regarded as hack. It's pretty much required when supporting multiple architectures / instruction sets. At some point there will likely be a ARMv8 architecture (if it doesn't exist yet).

Also many libraries make use of lipo to create convenient static binaries that can be used both in the simulator as well as on the device.

Well what I mean is I believe Apple will start rejecting apps at the review stage if they see its built with armv6. (Of course it's just my guess).

Wow. The contrast with Android is stunning.

Google has been focused on enabling backwards compatibility since at least Android 1.5 (well before anyone knew how Android updates would play out in practice): http://android-developers.blogspot.sg/2009/04/backward-compa...

Meanwhile, Apple seems to prefer to make achieving backwards compatibility as hard as possible (short of explicitly banning it).

OTOH when developing for Apple platforms there's not a huge loss when developing only for iOS 6+ (85% - 90% of users), whereas on Android you're pretty much required to target very outdated versions of Android as well. For example we target Android versions starting with Froyo.

Here's the announcement from Apple: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=3212013b

Not sure how that's been passed up in favour of talk about the UDID change. That's quite a big move from Apple really.

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