[callalex]

It’s also an insidious way to make perfectly good hardware obsolete. As Apple upgrades the OS, they slowly drop support for older hardware. This is usually justifiable, that’s just how OSs work for a variety of reasons.

However it also means that if all apps have to target the latest OS just to get some UI features, they will quickly end up dropping support for older hardware as well.

If you want a good example of this, check out the download page for Calibre, a simple app that helps to manage and convert eBooks.

[ghostpepper]

Apple provides longer support windows than most android manufacturers. If you don’t need the latest features then there’s nothing forcing you to throw away a working device.

[callalex]

But there is pressure forcing you to abandon functioning hardware, that’s my whole point. Obviously nobody should expect OS updates forever, but third party software stops supporting old hardware that they would run fine on because of the way that the runtime tightly couples with the OS.