HawaiinIce wrote:
I have an I Phone 7 Plus that looks like it just came out of the box. I had several apps stop working recently, and upon investigation, found out it is due to my not being able to upgrade the devices software to ios 16 or higher that is now required for these apps.
Can Apple not create a patch that will allow my apps to run on my otherwise perfectly fine phone, or is this just more planned obsolescence in order to force me to spend another $1200 or more on a new phone I don’t really need because I take care of my stuff???
This is not $12, or $120, it is $1200 that I don’t really have to throw away on another phone… And in actuality, we (my family and I) have 4 phones that would all need to be replaced, so we are talking more like $5000, soooo WTF Help…
The app vendors decided to drop support for their apps for iPhone 7, not Apple. The app vendors can absolutely support their apps running on older iOS versions, if they want to expend the time and effort required for that support.
For the hardware, iPhone 7 is a 2016-era design with low performance, and is lacking the necessary hardware features and memory expected and needed for newer iOS.
iPhone 7 with A10 system-in-a-chip processor (A10 is a 2016-era 2P2E design with two performance and two efficiency cores, and with 2 GB RAM) with a rating of ~757 single-core and ~967 multi-core performance, versus iPhone XS and iPhone XR with A12 (2P4E with 4 GB RAM) with ~1300 and ~2234. Basically, that means half the RAM memory and half the single-core performance of the oldest iPhones supported with iOS 17. With much older A10 processor hardware features.
The choice here being the extra effort for an older design or for hobbling iOS or quite probably both, or dropping the older devices and fully using the features and capabilities of the newer A12 processors in the newer iPhones. Supporting and testing and providing work-arounds for older and more limited devices is not without associated cost, and those older devices just aren’t going to get iOS and app features requiring newer hardware.
Percentages of older versions are dropping fast, too. Per: https://telemetrydeck.com/blog/ios-market-share-02-24/ “iOS 14 and 15 are now a negligibly small percentage of the TelemetryDeck data set.” and those already-small percentages are dropping. (Would you as a developer invest in supporting those small and quickly shrinking versions, or spend on those people spending on iPhones that can, for instance, run the three most recent iOS versions?)
