I still target 5.1 because it does 90% of what 7 does but still works on first gen iPads. Apple has a tendency to only implement software features on their newest OS instead of back porting to earlier versions, because it sells more devices. It's unleet for developers to encourage this.<p>I think a reasonable prime directive for API developers is that if hardware can do something then software shouldn't be prevented from running on it. Sure there are arguments for speed/responsiveness but most of these are straw men because the real bottlenecks are somewhere else (reading from flash memory, internet lag etc). The only real hardware constraints I hit daily are limitations in OpenGL or limited ram (which wouldn't be an issue if proper virtual memory had been in place from the beginning so we didn't have to use mmap).<p>This kind of software "truthiness" is taking us further and further from computer science.
Great points, except for "@2x only." If your app supports iPads, then the iPad 2 and iPad Mini (first generation) are both non-Retina screens and are still available for sale directly from Apple. Given Apple's 3 year support cycles, iOS 10 will be the first iOS that can fully drop support for non-retina displays <i>if</i> the iPad 2 and original iPad mini are discontinued by the end of this year.
Seems more like iOS 7 is the only <i>convenient</i> thing to do. That's fine, but the current title makes it read more like a weak attempt to justify not wanting to support older versions.
Note that Apple now keeps the previous version of the app around for users on older OSes. Of course they won't get any of the upgraded features, but at least there's still something there for them - and you won't have to worry about all that messy code for supporting multiple versions.<p>My next app updates will also be iOS7 only, since I know the iOS6 version will still be around. Makes it much easier to decide to use newer features.
There isn't anything in this article that explains why you can't support both. The only sentence about this is "We can’t leverage what iOS 7 has to offer and a lot of the UI is compromise.", which doesn't cite any difficulties they've run into. The only iOS 7 features they mention are UIDynamics and the receding keyboard—the rest are iOS 5/6 features.
You're fortunate you can afford to expend development effort/money on an update that won't bring in any more users. Im still licking my wounds from the app store change that came with ios6, sales are way way down to the extent that significant development work to these apps cannot be justified. With the pre ios6 app store I could make a case for it but not today.
Sheesh. Am I the only one still using a first-gen iPad stuck with iOS 5? Just a couple weeks ago my sister wanted to install an app that turned out to be iOS 7 only. Grr.
Interesting - I did not know about the new receding keyboard functionality.<p>For those curious, you can simply set a boolean on any UIScrollView or subclass to make the keyboard recede like in the Messages app.
Actually, that doesn't seem very sane to me. Why are we doing additional work for functionality that we already created, and losing support for people on older versions? Sure if you are a making a new app it makes sense to use great new features. It doesn't make sense to delete code that is working and redo it just because the new way is easier. 0 effort >>>> small effort times 10.
The sweet point for me has been iOS 6-7 support. There's little that iOS 7 has that I need to use, so a few conditionals here or there haven't been a huge deal (tintColor has been the only significant one). This contrasts immensely with trying to support back to iOS 5 where so many new things were added after (e.g., autolayout) that you end up with huge chunks of redundant code that differ only in the approach taken to get the end result.<p>My apps' interfaces are entirely customized, so everything looks roughly the same across the major versions. I've shifted to a flatter appearance since iOS 7, but I've held onto certain things from older ones that I like better such as borders on buttons where the button status is not clear from the context, filled toolbar icons (I hate the stenciled ones), and a shadowing level somewhere between iOS 6 and 7.
I was a bit on the fence about iOS versions before because I still have a first-generation iPad (iOS 5.1 maximum) and I wanted to make games for it. I have a new iPhone 5S as well.<p>I originally wrote game code with OpenGL ES, and then tried very hard to make the same code work on a Mac with regular OpenGL. It took more time than it should have to see results and it wasn’t that fun. About all I can say is that I learned a lot and OpenGL clearly runs efficiently.<p>After seeing Sprite Kit (Mac OS X Mavericks and iOS 7 only) and working with it, I am now <i>completely</i> devoted to these latest OSes. That framework has solved virtually all of my Mac/iOS parity issues, while allowing code to be almost identical in ways that really impressed me. Sprite Kit requires far less effort and it produces far greater results. About the only downside I see is that there would be no hope of porting my code to something like an Android phone (and I don’t happen to care about that).<p>It doesn’t hurt that Mavericks is free so about the <i>only</i> device left out in the cold is my old iPad. I decided that I was probably holding myself back by trying to support it anyway; the device is quite slow compared to almost any other iPad. I will likely just buy a new iPad.
I've done the same for the app that I work on, but not because I needed an if-else for the UI code. The biggest problem for me was that every now and then, I'd get a bug that shows up on a device, but not the simulator. If this happens even once, it is one time too many for a small team without a lot of leftover devices to sport old iOS versions on.
"This was one feature we really wanted and implementing this was painful as hell. I can’t believe it’s now just a boolean value away." - So awesome yet so frustrating! haha
Right to the point information. GREAT.<p>I've been programming on a daily basis for iOS even before the SDK came out (ohhh those reverse engineering days...!). Two years ago I left the job and since then I've always wondered what were the relevant changes in the SDK, just in case I get back to programming iOS again. And here we have it!
> When we added pull to refresh to our app there weren’t many apps using this technique and it added a premium feel to our app.<p>This makes me want to vomit. I can't wait until implementing flashy UI is so trivial and common that shallow things like this don't actually affect an application's perceived value. I don't remember the transition to GUI in the 80s as being as shallow as the mobile app market is.
There's really nothing sane about iOS/the iPhone when the government has full control over it.<p>The only sane thing to do is have it recycled.