iOS 7 is the first Apple system where I felt royally screwed. My iPhone 4 became so slow as to be nearly unusable. Everything now takes seconds, swipes are being missed, even audio gets chopped up when I play back podcasts over bluetooth.<p>There are two reasons for me to be angry about this:<p>* Apple should never have released iOS 7 for iPhone 4 devices. iPhone 4 should have been listed as "unsupported". But had they done that, they would have ended up with a fragmented ecosystem, and unable to brag about how so-and-so-many percent of users upgraded to the latest iOS.<p>* There is <i>no good reason</i> for iOS 7 to be slower than iOS 6. The "it requires more processing power for animations" reason is bogus, because there are very few animated effects, and I switched off whatever I could anyway. The only reason every iOS release is slower than the previous one is because Apple does not care about optimizations. They can afford not to care because every new hardware device is much faster than the previous one. But that means some users get royally screwed.<p>I should have stayed with iOS 6 (there is no going back now), but more importantly, Apple should not have claimed that iOS 7 is supported on my device. For all practical purposes, it isn't — the experience is really bad. I've just compared it to an iPhone 3G running iOS 4.2.1, it's more responsive than iOS 7 on iPhone 4.<p>So, this forced migration to iOS 7 is something that makes me angry, because I'm that part of the userbase than is being dragged into it kicking and screaming.
The original ipad can only be upgraded to iOS 5.1.1, I think.<p>There are a couple implications. First of all schools (like where my kids go) that bit the apple and deployed ipads to all the kids can't install or upgrade software after February. So if you're selling apps to kids, get your profits while you can. After february if they spend all their budget on upgrading ipads to the latest hardware so they could eventually install apps, they're not going to have any money to spend on apps, so that is a double whammy on sales. Something tells me no one told the accountants and administrators that the depreciation period was so short; much like elementary schools reuse textbooks for 20 years I think they were a wee bit optimistic about ipad usable lifespan.<p>Another implication is if you have a use case for app-less (web based) ipads, the market is probably going to absolutely flood in a couple months with cheap ipads that can't run modern native apps. So if you're trying to develop an ipad app for cheap people, the wise choice at this time would be web based not native. Also a web based solution could be sold to android users or desktop users or whatever.<p>The TLDR is native iOS apps are going to die pretty soon. Which is too bad, it was an interesting technological idea.
A few things people might be missing from this announcement.<p>1) Simply recompiling an application with iOS 7 SDK unlocks a different set of view metrics and subtle behaviors that are non-trivial to address. Developers need to make sure views lay out properly (accounting for the status bar, etc.) in both iOS 7 and iOS 5/6.<p>2) If you're a game company, chances are you can set your target device to iOS 5 and after making sure you account for the metrics changes you should be fine.<p>3) Clang/LLVM changes might cause a new crash when run on iPad 1, for example, because Apple won't be testing it anymore. You'll need to have this hardware around to verify everything runs if you want to support that device.<p>4) If the application is rarely updated or barely maintained, chances are it will be abandoned at this point. What used to be a simple bug fix here and there will now become a massive project.<p>5) Last and most important point, most software that IS maintained, or at least downloaded enough to warrant concern, I promise you that Apple's developer relations has a point person on top of it. All of your games and important tool makers are well aware of their need to transition to the new SDK if they haven't already. Perhaps a bug in 7.0 that will be fixed in 7.1 was keeping them from releasing an update.<p>5.1) If you have a game that is used on iPad 1, speak up and let the developer know so that they can make a decision to keep supporting it. OpenGL ES has been quite stable API-wise for quite some time so I suspect most games will continue to support iOS 5 for the foreseeable future.
Worth noting that first generation iPad, the current model until March 2011, will only run iOS 5.1.1 and has essentially been obsoleted by now.<p>Yes, it is theoretically possible to support earlier versions but Apple makes it practically very awkward: around half of the top apps don't support iOS 5. Apple's own apps apparently don't support iOS 6.
Doesn't requiring the new build pipeline plus 'optimized for iOS 7', mean you can't support most older iOS devices anymore? I know that is how the build pipeline stuff worked for desktop OS X apps - they tended to deprecate the ability to build for older OS versions when you installed the latest rev of XCode.<p>If so, how far back does it go? Like, if I compile an iOS7 optimized app, will it work on iOS6 devices? What about iOS5? Do they schedule the support deprecation based on lifetime (i.e. all devices released in last 2yrs will work) or is it just based on software versions?
What does that mean for third party applications? Like those built using Adobe Air, which as far as I'm concerned, does not use Xcode. Will an application that complies with the iOS 7 guideline be rejected just because it was not compiled under Xcode?