Developing for iOS 7 and supporting iOS 6 | Hacker News Reader

Developing for iOS 7 and supporting iOS 6

roadfiresoftware.com

42 pointsjtbrown14 comments

Posting's nice.

But, should we support users who don't even update iOS - which needs only one button tapping? Wishing them to search and install extra apps?

Yeah, there really isn't that much excuse for all those people out there with a 4th generation iPod touch not to upgrade immediately given that Apple licenses Amazon's one-click purchase patent: they are just one button tap away from a 5th generation iPod touch, and then they can use iOS 7... that's pretty lazy ;P.

Since you're asking... Had I updated to iOS 7, every single animation on my phone would have become jaggy, and the camera would just take forever (instead of current 15 seconds) to load.

Oh wait, my iPhone 35s doesn't support iOS 7 at all (for these reasons). But I know people with iPhone 4 who don't upgrade because iOS 7 lags too much even on iPhone 4.

Of course we gotta update our devices once in a while, but for those of us who don't live in the US and buy them unsubsidized, it costs some money. All I'm saying is, there are some reasons people won't upgrade right away even if they'd hell like to. Whether to support them for a while is up to you of course.

edit: and there's this iPod Touch thing of course.

I noticed this with Evernote.

I am still on my iPhone4 with iOS6 and now, everytime I try and sync my phone with iTunes I get the pop up notice that Evernote will not be synced as it requires a new OS version.

I have 100 apps on my phone and that one is the only one that does this. Why on earth did the developers require iOS7 as minimum? What is wrong with supporting iOS6 seeing as iOS7 is still in its "1.0" and not even 4 weeks old?

I get that they wanted to include iOS7 as early as possible. Hell, every app basically did. But Evernote is the only one of my apps that now apparently refuses to work with anything <iOS7.

I guess I was lucky that I still had it on my phone cause otherwise, I would be left without the ability to install it now.

Good points about Evernote - I'm not sure what went into their decision to support iOS 7 only, but I'm sure they considered it.

"I guess I was lucky that I still had it on my phone cause otherwise, I would be left without the ability to install it now."

That's not entirely true any more - Apple is now allowing users to install the "last compatible version" of apps. More on that from Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/17/apple-ios-last-compatible...

I'm not updating until iOS 7 has been properly jailbroken, which may take more than half a year.

And at another thread here people were saying how they add a fake hardware requirement (e.g front facing camera) just to deny people from installing in older phones because 'it run slow there'.

If you want to deny people from installing on older devices, you can just set the target to iOS 7, meaning you need iOS 7 to install it. Doing that means it can only be installed on iPhone 4 and later, iPad 2 and later, and iPod Touch 5th gen and later.

Great post. I've been holding off on an update due to the navbar issue and not wanting to deal with it at the moment. Thank for the write up!

Yeah, that navbar issue killed my productivity for at least a day. Glad I finally found the topLayoutGuide property so I can align my views properly.

Thanks for posting this, Josh! Really came at the exact right time for me as I work with our first production-worthy RubyMotion app.

Glad it was helpful to you. Tell me - do you build views in RubyMotion programmatically? If so, I suppose that -[UIViewController topLayoutGuide] would be useful, right?

Not really necessary - more than 90% users upgrade anyway.

Eventually, yes, most users upgrade. But Apple's stats showed about 6% of users still on iOS 5 a full year after iOS 6 was released. I'd imagine we'll see similar numbers with users going from iOS 6 to 7 - lots of them won't upgrade for a full year, and some will never upgrade. Mixpanel is currently showing 36% of users on iOS 6 - that's not an insignificant number. I'll be supporting iOS 6 for probably another year.

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