Requiring at least an iPhone 15 Pro also seems like a mistake, unless it’s for actual hardware reasons. The 15 is only 3 years old, this requirement cuts off a lot of potential users I think
I think it's the requirement of having 4gb+ vram (for gemma+context) free at any one time, any phone older than that cannot materially satisfy that demand: https://iosref.com/memory-processor
It’s definitely for hardware reasons. They have been aggressively improving the vector math capabilities in their chips, but as anybody who has tried to run a local LLM will tell you, newer hardware works better and you’re always limited in what you can do.