Can you drop iOS 4 support for an app already in the App Store? What iOS version is good to target?

Report · Sep 25, 2012

Now that AIR supports the MinimumOSVersion key, apps can set a specific minium version they will support. It wasn't available before, so it ended up in the app store with the default of 4.0.

Any device that AIR supported had to have ARMv7 anyways and I believe all ARMv7 iOS devices can update to at least 5.1.1, so would it be an issue with apple to drop iOS 4 support? Any device that could get the app before can upgrade to iOS 5+ for free to support it.

Only a small portion of people are still running iOS 4, and I get the feeling that most of those are folks with ancient ARMv6 devices that can't upgrade past iOS 4 and could never use the app anyways due to ARMv6. So why bother with testing for iOS 4 and possibly having to give iOS 4 related tech support?

If supporting 5+, is it a good idea to target 5.0 or 5.0.1 or 5.1 or 5.1.1 or what?

Report · Sep 25, 2012

We currently target 5.1+ because it makes for a clean cutoff on iCloud compatibility.

We are required to mark our resources as 'do not backup' for iCloud, and since the method of doing this is somewhat fragmented before 5.1, we break there and use only a single method of setting the attribute.

Report · Sep 28, 2012

Any of the non-user generated resources is in the tmp or Cache folders (which are not backed up) on mine, so that shouldn't be an issue in my case.

I looked at the wiki for iOS 5 and i didn't see any developer-related features other than that 'do not back up' thing that were added between sub-versions of iOS 5, so maybe I should target 5.0?

I'm still wondering, how do you handle dropping older versions of iOS? Surly developers can't be expected to maintain support for discontinued versions of iOS forever just because their app has been around for awhile? Apps eventually need to advance and use new OS features and require performance of current devices. Just set the MinimumOSVersion key to 5.0 or whatever and that's it?

Report · Sep 28, 2012

Yep, that's it. Apple will recognize your next build as needing 5.0, and all users of below that version will be prompted they must upgrade their OS before updating.