Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

FlightAware’s iOS app also just stopped supporting iOS 15 and, instead of just letting the old app continue to work, they did it with a full-screen modal telling iOS 15 users to fuck off and buy a new phone, preventing us from using the app that worked last week. Every other app on my phone gracefully continues to work on my old device except this one. This is absolutely bonkers and not the way any legitimate app does backwards compatibility. The developers over there are pretty clearly clowns that don’t know what they are doing.

View on HN

I love the idea that developers had the power to decide what is and isn't supported. That's clearly a manager's decision if not CEO.

Or they are shocked. Most companies I’ve been at, iOS version support is N-1. After that, we wouldn’t lock you out unless there was technical reason but no testing or support was done.

iOS ecosystem has always been like this since Apple supports phones for a long time.

Yea, I have no problem with them no longer issuing updates supporting iOS 15. It’s an old OS on an old device, and I get it: devs gotta move on. But don’t deliberately cause existing apps to stop working. No other app on my device behaves this way, and this is almost unheard of in the iOS ecosystem. This is where they went overboard. I looked and I’m surprised I couldn’t find an AppStore guideline prohibiting this.

My guess is technical reason drove decision not “Lolz, no more iOS 15”. Looking at our telemetry data, less then 1% of devices that run our B2B app are iOS 15 or older. If we ran into iOS 15 issue, we would lock them out as well.

It amazes me the money that brick and mortar businesses would spend to increase customers by a tenth of a percent, yet online businesses have no problem simply deciding that 1% of their clients are disposable. They would rather develop some new shiny feature that won't bring any new clients, than continue supporting a device that was sold new three years ago.

At most companies I have been at the devs have had a lot of say in discussions like this.

Of course, because the managers have no idea about the cost-benefit tradeoffs of such a technical decision.

They do, CEOs usually don't make such minor decisions

To be fair, you’re using a 8-year old device that has been unsupported by Apple for 2. I’m sure some websites already aren’t working for you and I’d expect a “web service” app wrapper to have similar limitations. To support your device, they probably would have to keep a legacy version of their web apps around, so it does not come free.

For a free app, supporting a device for 7 years is already a long time. With iOS 18 around the corner, it makes every day more sense to cut you off.

Don't look at it as "not supporting an 8-year-old device" which can't get the update; look at it through the lens of "not supporting an OS which had its initial release just under 3 years ago and is still receiving support itself."

There are plenty of reasons (of varying reasonableness) to avoid an update; people on an OS version this new shouldn't be getting this kind of harsh treatment.

If you have app features that rely on a new iOS feature, you could just put those behind a feature flag.

If your core API changes substantially over time meaning that out-of-date versions of your app quickly stop working without updates, it's better for the user if you use something like Swagger to auto-generate the API stubs; it makes it much easier to support your app in the long term, even for users on what would otherwise be unsupported platforms.

If you're dropping support because supporting an older OS creates irreparable security issues, well, I guess in this case they might actually be ok with that.

iOS ecosystem generally doesn't work like that. Most people upgrade to latest when latest.1 comes out so around December. Those on latest - 1 will remain until they become latest - 2 next September and by then, they will very likely upgrade to latest because they buy a new phone. See this blog article by Telmetry Deck about iOS 17 adoption: https://telemetrydeck.com/blog/ios-market-share-13-23/

Since Apple controls phone updates and phone support is long, unlike Android, most companies only do latest - 1 except around September when they will do latest - 2. However, most don't cut people off, you are just unsupported land and they will if older iOS versions give them any trouble.

Apps stop issuing updates for my old device all the time. I understand why and I live with it. What they don’t do is remotely disable their apps, forcing me to stop using them. That’s totally unacceptable, even for a free app. Especially for a free app! They spent developer effort to deliberately do it.

I don’t think you understand what it takes to support “unsupported devices”. I already explained that it does take effort, so without that screen you’d have a broken app.

Also stop complaining, it’s a free app, get a new phone already.

It takes zero effort to keep an existing app running that's already installed on a user's old phone. You simply do nothing! Don't issue updates or go out of your way to remotely disable users, and instead focus on shiny new phones. If the app hits a server API, you just make sure that API version doesn't get touched (you are versioning your APIs right?). It's not rocket science.

Sorry, everyone has one HN soapbox, and you happen to have run into mine. Software developers need to stop being so hostile to users with devices they deem "old and icky". This includes OS vendors, too by the way, I'm not leaving them out. Supporting only N-1 is a user-hostile policy, and it's driven primarily out of developer laziness rather than business need. Remotely disabling any version is absolutely appalling, and I hope that practice doesn't catch on.

> I hope that practice doesn't catch on.

I got news for you, they invented something called websites and all they do is remotely disable what appears in your browser. Next thing you know, they place them in webviews and show "Your browser is not supported because it's running on a 8-year-old device."

I don't know how else to tell you that they did not break something that works, but simply stopped serving an old web view because supporting it DOES NOT come for free. Do you still ship IE6 views for the lone monthly viewer too?

There is nothing fair about this since the OS/device would continue to work just fine, and for many more years, unless the user hostile decision to block was made

Reply on news.ycombinator.com