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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I can give you an egregious example: FlightAware. Not only do they not offer updates that support 16.x (fine, I’d just use the last version that still works on my phone) but instead, their last update puts a full screen modal dialog up, telling me the app will no longer run and that I need to buy a new phone that supports the latest iOS. You can’t even dismiss the modal, so the app effectively no longer works. Total “fuck you” to users!

I’d love 5 minutes in a room alone with the bonehead PM or eng lead who decided this was a good way to treat your users.

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Software engineers are notorious for not wanting to support legacy devices and software. You see this all of the time on Hacker News. If you want more venders to support older devices, you need to change the culture. You also need to acknowledge the costs. Here are the costs:

1.Increased software development costs - Costs increase because software has to be designed to fallback to alternative implementations when the newest OS, browser, database, etc. features are not available.

2. Increased performance optimization costs. Older devices tend to be slower and this means software engineers will have to spend more time optimizing programs.

3. Increased testing costs - You need to test all features on older and newer devices.

The other problem is it might not be worth it to support older devices. Basically, supporting older devices may not be profitable (i.e. too few users who do not generate enough revenue to justify the increased costs).

None of those points incentivise software developers to deliberately block me from using the “last working version”. That last version already exists: it was already tested, already performed well, and had all of its engineering costs already spent. Suddenly stopping me from using it does not impact their profit in the slightest.

I was an iOS developer in a past life. It doesn’t take that much effort to keep the lights on on the older OS. But even if it did, it makes zero sense to suddenly make that already working older version stop working.

There is a little difference between not supporting any more and blocking the user.

I can find some recent internet posts noting that FlightAware dropped iOS 15 support, but at present it claims to support iOS 16.4 or later devices, which would include the 7 and 8 if updated. I don't use iOS 16 or FlightAware, so it's possible that they allow you to install it from the store and then do some runtime check and refuse to actually run, but that would be super weird behaviour.

I get why devs do this sometimes. iOS bakes a lot of support into the OS (so does Android, though increasingly because of slow uptake of new versions Google baking everything into the Play API), and iOS 16 is necessary for a variety of APIs, and even a lot of SwiftUI functionality if they went down that route. And then your APIs start changing so you end up invariably doing breaking changes so you can't just ignore the old versioned apps in the wild.

iPhone 7 is stuck on iOS 15.8.3[1].

> I don't use iOS 16 or FlightAware, so it's possible that they allow you to install it from the store and then do some runtime check and refuse to actually run, but that would be super weird behaviour.

This is exactly what they appear to be doing. It should be against Apple’s guidelines to release an app that simply says “go away until you buy a new phone.”

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_7

Ah, sorry, mea culpa I thought the 7 and 8 were getting the same updates.

So the 7 is stuck on 15, and it is the one being left out courtesy of 15. Still doesn't address the submission though that is claiming this about the 8 and 16, which as of now is still very widely supported. I assume the author is just reading the tea leaves and predicting what is ahead. Eventually 16 will be deprecated too, though it isn't right now.

FlightAware on the App Store likely works perfectly, though it would require 16.4+ on devices like the 8 or newer. The "you can't use this anymore" is likely a startup API check on previously installed and no longer updatable versions.

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