[IloveHN84]

Here people is complaining about Google bad policies..but have you ever seen/read/experienced changes in iOS ecosystem? All the new SDK versions must support newer devices while deprecating old versions of iOS.

At least, you pay a fee of 25$ and it's on you (or Google). Paying 99$/year and still experiencing some strong frustration at each newer release and change is much more for fetishism

[scarface74]

Seeing that the newest phone that doesn’t support the latest version of iOS was released in 2012, I don’t see a problem with Apple deprecating older versions of iOS.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

People use older devices.

[scarface74]

https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store/

80% of all iOS devices are on iOS 12. An additional 12% are on iOS 11. Any device that can run iOS 11 can also run iOS 12.

By not supporting older devices, you are missing out on at most 8% of the iOS population. But even some percentage of those are able to update to iOS 12.

To target anything older than the 5s means you also have to target 32 bit processors. How much time are you going to spend targeting such a small user base?

Besides, if you have an older version already in the App Store, they can download “the last compatible version”.

[armagon]

80% of all devices that use the app store.

You'd better believe there are older devices out there, and people would use the app store with them, iff the app store would only show you apps (or versions of apps) that still run on your device.

It is frustrating trying to get games on an old iPad for the kids.

[scarface74]

If they don’t use the App Store and that’s the only way that they can get apps, then why would you spend time and money supporting them?

[vetinari]

It's not that they do not want to use App Store. They can't.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

8% of the iOS user base is still millions of people

[scarface74]

So does that mean you also support 3.5” screens? If you want to support older devices that can’t run iOS 12 but have the same screen size as a supported device then you limit support to the 5 and the poorly selling 5c.

How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? The 4s? The 4? The 3GS? The 3G? The original iphone?

[cm2187]

I compare that to Windows which has been around two decades longer than iOS and Android and which APIs have remained remarkably stable and backward compatible. It is possible to do it. It is just more work.

[indigo945]

Well, to be fair, this comes at the cost of Windows (like other major desktop operating systems) being considerably less secure than Android or iOS. This tradeoff is not easy to avoid except by designing the permission model to be sane from the start, and we all know that good upfront design doesn't exist.

[oarsinsync]

Legacy baggage also comes at the cost of performance, which in the case of mobile devices, means reduced battery life.

As an app developer, it's immensely frustrating to have to keep updating apps to stay on top of the latest SDK.

As a mobile user, I delete apps that get flagged up as battery hogs.

So that leaves me with a fairly simple choice, and I keep stuff updated if I expect anyone to keep using it, and if I abandon it, I shouldn't be surprised when my users do the same.

[curlypaul924]

That's not really being fair; Windows was created decades before Android (one decade if you only count NT). The security model is different, because it was created in a different computing era.

I think the difference in API stability is a result of the different financial motivations between Microsoft and Google. For Microsoft, the OS itself was the product; to not make the APIs backward-compatible would have meant significantly less revenue and market share.

For Google, the OS is not the product. Google doesn't make any less money when someone continues to run an old version of Android. There is no monetary incentive to make new versions of the OS API-compatible with older versions, nor is there any monetary incentive to make new versions of the OS run on old devices.

Consider also that the cost of upgrading to a new (non-flagship) device in 2019 is much cheaper than in 1995. A typical PC circa 1995 could cost $2000 or more (price adjusted for inflation). Today, you can get an entry-level mobile phone for 1/10 that price. Back then, a family might hold on to a computer for five or ten years, because it was so expensive to upgrade. That makes paying $100 or so for an OS upgrade every few years worthwhile, because it's much cheaper than buying a new PC.

[tomatotomato37]

Arguably the pros of just making security the users problem outweigh the cons of trying to protect the foolish from themselves. The desktop ecosystem for all its security problems is rather vivid

[specialist]

Win16/Win32, sure. Everything else, eg DLLs, I bundled known good with the app. Microsoft was notorious for slipstreaming changes.

[Tsubasachan]

Not anymore. Windows as a service is starting to break things now.

[pragmaticlurker]

Agree, but Microsoft has another target, such as big Enterprises clients