Which iOS versions do we want to support?

[wtimme]

I am curious to know how many people are still using which version of iOS. With #427, for example, we cannot use the newer APIs, but always have to keep backwards compatibility in mind.

When can we drop support for the older iOS versions?

The companies that I've worked for had rules such as "the latest stable iOS version and one version back". Applied to today's situation, that would mean to support iOS 13 and 14.

When is a good time to drop the support for older iOS versions?

Could you provide insights on how many users we have per iOS version? You should be able to easily get that data from App Store Connect. Thanks in advance!

[tordans]

@wtimme the Screenshots from #326 (comment) are not too old. And I think Bryce wrote in a different comment that the Next will be the Last release for some old iOS version.

[wtimme]

Thanks for the reminder! Yes, those are the data values I am looking for.

According to Wikipedia, iOS 13.7 supports the iPhone 6S - a device released five years ago. From my point of view, dropping the support for these old iOS versions is fine. But that's an easy thing to write on an iPhone X.

[dieterdreist]

according to a matrix I found by searchengine: http://dorianroy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/iPhone-Specs-Matrix-1.1.pdf devices down to an A9 all support ios14. The cutoff is at iPhone 6s (2015) which is the oldest still included. iPhone 6 (2014, A8) and iPhone5s (2013, A7) stopped at iOS12. Their predecessor, iPhone5 (2012) still runs on iOS10. The iPhone4s (great device by 2011) can upgrade until iOS9.

[bryceco]

Currently we support all the way back to iOS 9. I'd like to drop devices prior to iOS 12 after the next release. One of the TestFlight betas that used SVG (iOS 13 or later) rather than PDF images generated some bug reports from people running pre-13 devices, so there are definitely people out there running older versions.

[richlv]

Coming in as an individual user - using GoMap!!! on iPhone6, which only supports iOS 12.
Pre-12 drop would not affect me, but any further cuts would make the app unavailable.

[wtimme]

While digging around in the code base, I noticed that we are using NSISO8601DateFormatter (in POIAllTagsViewController.m), which was only introduced in iOS 10. Now I am not 100% sure, but if we did not wrap the calls in @available, these parts of the code will not work on pre-iOS 10.

[bryceco]

bd30420 bumps it to 10.2
If there are specific features of later iOS versions that we want then we can discuss moving to 12.x

[1ec5]

Xcode 12 has begun warning about minimum deployment targets lower than iOS 12, so it might eventually become untenable to stay on iOS 10. Past iOS 10, the main benefit is streamlining code that would otherwise resort to @available/#available usage, such as safe area insets (iOS 11) for plus-sized screens, system named colors (iOS 13) for dark mode, and CarPlay (iOS 12) for voice-dictating edits while driving. 😛 iOS 12.2 comes with Swift ABI stability, but users of iOS 12.2 and above are probably already getting a slimmed-down build of the application.

[bryceco]

Xcode 12 has begun warning about minimum deployment targets lower than iOS 12, so it might eventually become untenable to stay on iOS 10.

I agree the time is approaching rapidly. One of my reasons for resisting forward progress is that iOS has a bit of a reputation for being elitist, and supporting old devices allows people who want an inexpensive device to use an old iOS device rather than being forced to android. Maybe that's too idealistic.

Past iOS 10, the main benefit is streamlining code that would otherwise resort to @available/#available usage, such as safe area insets (iOS 11) for plus-sized screens, system named colors (iOS 13) for dark mode, and CarPlay (iOS 12) for voice-dictating edits while driving. 😛

Those are all great features, and I especially use voice dictation with the app a lot. Unfortunately my car (Tesla) doesn't support CarPlay so I can't use that part. If you search the code for @available it's mostly iOS 13 for dark mode support, and bumping to 13 is DOA for me. The support for "Dynamic Type - Automatically adjust font" checkbox would also be super nice, but I don't know the degree to which that's impacting users currently.

[saper]

I am using Go Map! on oldish 32-bit iPad Mini left stuck at iOS 9.3.6, late to the party :(

[bryceco]

Closing since 10.2 will be the minimum for a while.