This is nice in that Apple acknowledges that iPhone 6s and iPhone 7 devices still exist and are used. I wish third party developers would read that memo and get with the program. The App Store is becoming a ghost town of "This app stopped supporting your icky old device" warning messages due to app developers abandoning these phones.

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kstrauser 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Apps don’t support devices, by and large. They support SDK versions. Targeting a 4 year old SDK means not using a fair chunk of new OS features, which translates to at least some lost sales and developer happiness.

I’m sympathetic with your point, truly, but I also get why devs would aim at newer OSes.

	▲	ryandrake an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think you might be confusing two things. iOS developers build against a particular SDK, but they specify a deployment target which is an OS version. You can build against the latest or near-latest SDK (in fact Apple requires you to), while still targeting arbitrarily old OS versions. The developer changes these independently. Developers can easily use APIs introduced after their deployment target OS. So if you want to target iOS 15, but use APIs introduced in iOS 17, you can easily do this with a runtime check. Many iOS developers choose to increase their deployment target, which accomplishes nothing for the user besides locking out older devices, while making the developer's life more comfortable (he can abandon those runtime checks and code paths that only run on older devices). But if you are disciplined and care about your users on old devices, you can very easily target those old devices while still using the latest and greatest OS features on devices that have them.
	▲	compounding_it 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And the ‘features’ also involve lot of performance updates that can leverage something like newer metal. Given that a large chunk of the user base uses an iPhone from 1-2 years ago it simply makes sense to use this and abandon old SDK. This makes me wonder though how Apple seems to deal with this for their core apps.

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eviks an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

They got the memo... directly from Apple that drops fully functional phones with their SDK updates, only giving you tiny crumbs of security update once in a while