Your app vendors are making their business decisions. They can hit 98% of customers by coding with the modern, feature rich, man hour efficient APIs. The short tail of early model iPads in use don’t justify the larger expense to develop and test using the older APIs.

Apple doesn’t say it out loud, but they can’t just decide to support the new iOS versions on the first few versions of hardware. There just isn’t enough processing power there to deliver a respectable user experience with the new software. Sure, it worked fine when new, but as processor cycles got more plentiful, they still all got used by programmers.

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* one site is showing 98% of users running iOS 12 or higher.

* just 0.1% are stuck at iOS 6.

* the site: http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/template_

My problem isn't that new stuff stopped being developed. It's that old stuff that previously worked is now broken. Supposedly, the app store will keep track of versions and let you download the "last known good" version for your hardware. Unfortunately, many devs released updates that claimed to work on hardware that it didn't actually work on. I had a program that got an update, and suddenly wouldn't work because it now required a "front facing camera" on hardware that had no such camera. They overwrote the "last known good" version for my hardware, so there was no way to go back. Even if they don't actively develop and support things on the old hardware, how about just not screwing it up for people?

My Macbook Air just went out of OS support, and apps have already started to bitrot. My iPhone just went out of iOS support, so it's just a matter of time before I start getting "bad" updates that wreck my stuff. My iPad and iPod touch went out of support years ago, and the only thing that still worked consistently was 2 magazine subscriptions on the iPad...which broke sometime in August 2019.

How much effort is it to keep the digital lifeline services still working, so that I can continue to use paid-for content and apps? I know it's greater than 0, but I went from being a dedicated Apple user to one who will never buy another Apple product. Every single previous purchase has resulted in pristine and perfectly functioning hardware being rendered useless by loss online support services. If I can't update on my schedule and my budget, I can't justify buying the hardware.

App creators are given an API and ways not to break support for your device; it’s on them to do device testing of all their app’s corner cases. This doesnt seem unreasonable to me. What else should apple do?

Apple can share the blame, because they didn't test the app like they should have to verify that the app was in fact compatible with the hardware the dev claimed. Or maybe the dev did everything right, but Xcode had a bug.

But mainly, just let me download whatever previous version I want.

Maybe Apple doesn't have a spare iPad just lying around; they're hoping that the devs have bought all their extras, to test software updates in different platforms...

Why not let the user download any old version? Let the users mark newer versions as broken for their hardware, so that the last-known-working-version is not reset?

I mean, they have a platform, but the feedback loop seems kind of broken.

Meanwhile, Nokia N900 is still a capable device with new software releases being developed for it (like Devuan-based Maemo Leste or Alpine-based postmarketOS).

You can go into the App Store settings and disable auto-updating. Seems like that could fix the issue for you?

One used to be able to back up apps directly to Mac or PC via iTunes but it seems like that ability was lost in 2018, now that I search for it.

For Macs, it’s still easy. Use time machine and if an app updates to a bad version you can just restore the earlier .app file from your time machine.

I’m consistent stunned at how a community built around tech startups cannot understand these business trade offs. People talk about mvps and happy paths and growth hacking but can’t understand how a business could look at some niche use case and say “yeah that deserves total support.”

Keeping stuff working across updates is a niche use case?

But, Apple is going above and beyond to coerce users into needlessly updating. I was actually forced to update my iPad because I forgot my pin[1].

Everything Apple has done has had the effect of slowly bricking your iPad, bit by bit.

And these so called "upgrades" have only had the effect of removing features and slowing my device, and generally degrading the UX. This is not ok.

I never actually purchased my iPad, it was given to me to develop medical software. And even though it was used in a closed offline environment, this forced update still broke things and set back our development. I also know a teacher who was forced to shelve her lessons after she was tricked into updating her iPad 4 to iOS 11, which had so much latency when typing that it was rendered virtually useless.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986500

My old iPads become single purpose devices around the house. I have an iPad 3 with a powered speaker case. I think the case was originally $300, but I got it for $25 because of the obsolete tech. That's a dedicated GarageBand machine for when my nephews come over.

Another old iPad is the dedicated darts scoring tablet.

"and that one over there we use to prop open the door on a hot day."

I do similar. I have two set up as camera monitors that can also pull up my rooftop weather station dashboard as wanted.

I'm in the same boat with my launch day iPad. It still works great for e-mail, but pretty much every other app is useless now. So I just keep it by the couch in case I want to look at e-mail.

That said, it's a 10-year-old machine. I don't have any desktop or laptop computers left that are good for anything other than e-mail, either.

My late 2011 Macbook Pro is what I am using to reply to this comment. I can even do some light gaming on this still if I so choose. Plenty fast for anything web(including streaming video), coding and certainly email. I actually cannot bring myself to buy anything new because the mild bump I might get will hardly be worth what I have to pay to get that bump.

The difference with desktop operating systems are that applications almost always work for many, many releases. This does not seem to be the case with iOS.

My main desktop isn't quite 10 years old (I got it in 2013), but it works quite well for rather more intensive uses such software development and playing games, despite not upgrading anything other than the hard drives. Admittedly, it was a high-end system when I bought it.

I think it’s a little unfair to compare a 10 year old desktop today with a 10 year old ipad today because the rate of progress for desktops has been much lower (and many programs are designed to work on less powerful laptops).

Instead consider that a 10 year old laptop in 2010 would be basically useless and massively heavy, or a 10 year old desktop in eg 2007.

GP did say that "desktop or laptop computer" didn't last 10 years either. I agree that desktops are going to age better than any other segment of computers.

Desktop performance hasn't progressed as rapidly in the last 10 years (relative to each successive generation of desktop) in comparison to iPad's which seem to have doubled in speed each successive generation.

The comparison isn't about hardware speed though, its about software versions. I had an iPad as well. Then successive updates which made it slower and slower, and eventually older software stopped working.

Compare to Android, where I can still run many modern apps on old hardware with Android 2.3, or at least could at the time my iPad was almost completely obsoleted and I sold it off.

Its like if you were forced to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista on your 512MB laptop - which could handle Windows XP just fine but couldn't handle Vista, even though yes Vista came with many new features.

Until early last year, my Plex server was a circa 2009, Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell laptop with 8GB of RAM and a gigabit Ethernet port. It was running Windows 10.

As of last year, the last time I used my first gen iPad, Netflix, Hulu, Plex and Crackle still worked.

These are some of the reasons for which I tend to prefer PDF files for eBooks rather than attachment to anyone's specific viewers (Apple or otherwise). I still have 20 year old PC's running useful software (example: A $30,000 test instrument that consists of a domain-specific card plugged into a PC running Windows 95).

In general terms, the PC world has been characterized for what I usually describe as an intense respect for the hardware and software investment made by users not to become unnecessarily (or unjustifiably) obsolete. Another example I have of this is the Adobe CS4 suite, which we purchased back in 2008 and is perfectly usable (and in use on a daily basis) 12 years later across many evolutions of the Windows hardware and software landscape.

We also have Apple products, Macs, iPads, etc. I still remember Apple pushing the reset button twice; once in transitioning to the PowerPC processors and then abandoning the platform; obsoleting all existing software in the process. Twice.

Not complaining, just a historical perspective and a difference in philosophy between two segments of the market. I never go into the Apple ecosystem assuming the solutions are going to survive the test of time. On the other hand, in the PC world, it is likely safe to assume you are in full control of when you might want to obsolete the hardware and software you purchase. From a business perspective this difference is important.

This is a similar reason as to why I am done paying for apps/games for phones. The phone I have can run the app or game and I upgrade the OS and I find that because no one was buying the game anymore it just was never signed for the new OS and will not run. It could run just fine, but it has been abandoned because the developer went on to something new.

Services like Steam do a way better job of keeping games running than the typical app store does for games and apps.

A related change is what has bugged me a lot about having control over the apps (and app versions) on our devices. Ever since Apple removed syncing apps with a computer from iOS 9 onwards, claiming that it's required for app thinning, the "cloud" is the only option for apps. And the cloud really sucks – it's quite slow even when setting up a new device where it downloads all apps again, and many a times gets the newest version which you may not want. Apple could have provided a way to store, on the computer, multiple binaries for an app depending on the device architectures used by that user and have iTunes sync the correct binary, but decided not to. Then Apple completely removed the App Store part from iTunes.

That’s unfortunate. Which hardware version do you have? Apple has been supporting older devices fairly well from my perspective, often reaching back 5 years or more.

The iPad 1, which I owned though I'm not the parent commenter, came with iOS 3, and the final compatible release was iOS 5 two years later. It worked poorly with iOS 5 after two years, and was fully obsolete after three years.

Even for those early days, it went from new to obsolete extremely fast.

The first iPad aged really fast. I have a conspiracy theory that they brought the iPad 2 to Steve first and he told them to fatten it up and slow it down because it was already ahead of the market. There was a huge size decrease between the first 2.

I think that's just a thing with Apple version 1. The original iPhone, Macbook Air, and Apple Watch were all pretty underpowered, and were quickly and thoroughly obsoleted by the next one or two models. The first Apple Watch model faded so hard that it's now informally called Series 0.

My old iPhone 4 still works - I just keep it in airplane mode 24/7 and never allow it to connect to the internet

What iPad do you have?

The original iPad. Per Wikipedia, it had full software support for 2 years, 5 months. Which was by far the shortest support lifespan of any iPad.

It had only 256MB of RAM, compared to the iPhone 4 that came out 3 months later with 512MB of RAM.