[eganist]

It's considerably rare for me to do this, but I'll advocate for the devil in the white suit.

Imagine you added support for a device that's not out yet, that you probably don't even physically possess (unless you're a heavy developer, and even that's probably a pre-release model), but that you're assuming will readily accept your updated app. Except when finally the device is released, it turns out the support you added for the new device was imperfectly applied, frustrating the experience of users everywhere who are used to this app working just fine on other devices but not this one.

Now imagine this happening with multiple apps, perhaps because the developer documentation for the device was an inferior match for reality, perhaps because the documentation was consistently mis-interpreted, perhaps because the emulation in development was slightly inaccurate. Whatever the cause, a vast lot of supposedly compatible apps are very much not.

Which product's image is harmed most by this outcome?

[bfred_it]

That’d make sense if it was what Apple says.

They allow anyone to say that their app is XS-compatible even if they never owned an iPhone.

Their worry is not actual compatibility.

[masklinn]

True, Apple's stated reasons are even simpler and more sensible: you can't advertise compatibility to a pre-GM application or device. That's part of the rules, and explicitly stated in the original rejection message.

[ender89]

GM stands for Gold Master I believe. Apple's concern therefore isn't that the device isn't out yet, it's that it's not finalized, and they don't want an app update to say that it supports something which isn't finalized yet because it could change tomorrow (even if that's unlikely).

[pentae]

In this hypothetical scenario how could it possibly be a worse outcome compared to not attempting to support compatibility at all?

[yodon]

Devs can still try to support the XR, Apple is just saying don't claim to support it. That approach is often described as "under promise and over deliver" (and generally works better than the reverse)