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IOS Apple

Appocalypse Now - How iOS11 Will Kill Some Of Your Favourite iPhone Apps (independent.ie) 177

Ronan Price, writing for Independent: The app-ocalypse is coming and almost no one knows it. Apologies for the dreadful pun but, in about six to eight weeks' time, hundreds of thousands of older apps for iPhone and iPad will cease to work when Apple updates its iOS software to version 11. Businesses and consumers who rely on these elderly apps and update to iOS11 without knowing the consequences face a rude awakening. Their difficulty ranges from mere inconvenience that a useful app no longer functions to the complete loss of valuable data buried in a piece of obsolete software. Apple began signalling two years ago that it was signing the death warrant for older apps when it moved iOS to 64-bit software - essentially a more secure, faster and technologically advanced version that replaced the previous 32-bit code. First, Apple encouraged developers to rewrite their apps to 64-bit status but continued to allow 32-bit apps to function. Then it began to warn developers and customers that future iOS updates would experience compatibility issues. You may have seen -- and ignored -- the messages when launching apps in the last year telling you "App X needs up to be updated, the developer needs to update it to improve its compatibility." Finally, just this June, Apple confirmed that iOS11 would put the kibosh on 32-bit forever when it's released into the wild in late September. The announcement came and went with little fanfare from the public's perspective.
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Appocalypse Now - How iOS11 Will Kill Some Of Your Favourite iPhone Apps

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  • Rewrite your app? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28, 2017 @09:57PM (#54901931)

    You don't have to rewrite shit.

    You just have to update the SDK and compile. Done. It's not even fucking hard to do. These old apps are not supported or developed by anyone, that is to say they're unsupported by their developers. Get over it.

    • Very old apps that aren't supported anymore are very likely broken at this point anyway. IOS isn't all that kind about reverse compatibility. Most apps need at least a little touching up each time a new version is released.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    This sounds a lot like Firefox 57's WebExtensions transition, which will reportedly break compatibility with many older extensions. While Apple can probably get away with breaking compatibility, I don't know if Firefox will survive it.

    • Firefox has been losing users for some time and has a fraction of the market share it once had. The breaking changes to extensions and plugins and the UI rearrangements surely aren't helping.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    DEATH TO APPS!

  • The iOS 11 betas have been so absurdly buggy - and yes, that's compared to other betas - that, unless there's some absolutely horrible security risk found which only iOS 11 patches, I'm going to be sitting on 10.x for as long as I possibly can.

    I fully expect iOS 11 (release) to be really, really bad for quite a while.

    • by tk77 ( 1774336 )

      The last couple iOS 11 beta's have been pretty solid on my iPad 10.5". Maybe they are buggier on the phone? I haven't had the nerve to upgrade my phone yet

      • Been running iOS 11 since dev release on my phone. Works fairly well on latest beta release. Only issue not fixed by, at most, a quick restart is that I can no longer stream videos from iTunes libraries using Home Sharing. It actually did work on previous beta releases. But if that's not an issue for you, do and iTunes backup and get the beta. It's doing alright for me. P.S. Biggest issue requiring restart is the phone will have trouble maintaining LTE connection and will drop down to 3G. Happens about onc
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Seriously, given the summary clearly Apple did everything they would reasonably be expected to do to 'warn' developers & consumers. I'm no Apple fan but what would anyone suggest they do otherwise? And there's an option I presume to not accept the upgrade & not run in to the issue. Potentially the complete lack of 'public fanfare' actually means 'no one cares' & this isn't going to actually affect anyone whether its their 'favorite' LoL Cat video app or whatever.

    Sensationalizing this via using t

  • There is no good excuse for this sort of obsolescence. Apple has the ability to both one time and dynamically recompile as well as emulate. They and any OS manufacturer can fix this problem. It is time for regulations that enforce a rule that OS companies stop creating obsolescence but must instead maintain legacy support.

    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      How would you dynamically recompile a program written in C? Emulation on mobile platforms is likewise costly. On the other hand the apps could have various security bugs that later compilers pick up on.

      It's mostly very old apps that nobody supports will stop working and for everyone of those there are a hundred different new ones. Nobody cares that your fart app will stop working, you'll find another one. Commercial apps have already gotten updates.

      • What do you consider a commercial app? I have a few more expensive apps ($20 range) that are no longer maintained. I also have several from very large corporations in the same boat.

        The bottom line is a number of apps were built and sat for the past five years in a perfectly functional state with no ongoing development. These will no longer function.

        • And no one in that period has developed a competing app, with new features. Lucky you.
          The silliest apps get an immediate clone, yet your $20 app 2 3 4 year old app is untouchable.

          • There are alternatives... maybe 10-20 of them, all paid, and all $10+. Finding the one that works for you is non-trivial and can quickly become very expensive for a reasonably trivial application you paid for already.

    • I can think of one good reason off the top of my head: security. I don't want a bunch of legacy subsystems, emulators, and compatibility layers on my devices, that can eventually become vectors. This isn't theoretical either, the PS Vita comes to mind first. I believe when it was first rooted, it was done so via its PSP emulator. Besides, how far back do you mandate? More than five years?
      • by Khyber ( 864651 )

        Moving to 64-bit doesn't exactly improve security when you don't even have enough RAM installed in the phone to even reach the 32-bit memory limit in the first place.

        • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Moving to 64-bit doesn't exactly improve security when you don't even have enough RAM installed in the phone to even reach the 32-bit memory limit in the first place.

          64-bit on ARM was never about memory. It was about speed - AArch64 had to divest itself of a lot of AArch32 legacy crap that was holding it back. Like conditional execution of instructions, a mainstay of ARM since the very beginning. (It unfortunately does not work in today's world of superscalar architectures where there may be a dozen instruc

  • "32-bit apps don't surf!"

    -Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore

  • Fuck'em all.
    I say, disable anything 65-bit.

  • ...somebody will either update the app or somebody else will duplicate its functions in a new app.
    No need to get suicidal.

  • No point in using ASLR when your flagship phone doesn't even come with half the RAM necessary to necessitate its use (2GB RAM on the iPhone 7.)

  • It would be nice if iOS v11 can tell users which 32-bit apps will be unsupported and removed.

    • You can tell in iOS 10 - go to System Settings, General, About. Under Applications, it will say how many are installed. If any have not been updated to 64 bit, there will be a > reveal.

      Tap that if it appears and it'll tell you which apps will be disabled under iOS 11.

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