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by fnayr 4837 days ago
The real story here is not the UDID ban which we knew was coming (and is easily counter-able as demonstrated in the comments already), but the forced iPhone 5 support.

Now this wouldn't be an issue except that Apple doesn't allow you to support the iPhone 5 without targeting iOS 4.3 or higher. So this kills off support for iOS 3.1.3-4.2. This might not seem like such a bad thing, but if you're targeting certain demographics like kids (as I am), it cuts off a significant percentage (7% in my case) of users.
2 comments
buddydvd 4837 days ago
Apparently, with the lipo tool, you can still support iOS below version 4.3 and Apple won't reject it.

See: http://stackoverflow.com/a/12678077

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fpgeek 4837 days ago
Wow. The contrast with Android is stunning.

Google has been focused on enabling backwards compatibility since at least Android 1.5 (well before anyone knew how Android updates would play out in practice): http://android-developers.blogspot.sg/2009/04/backward-compa...

Meanwhile, Apple seems to prefer to make achieving backwards compatibility as hard as possible (short of explicitly banning it).

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wsc981 4837 days ago
OTOH when developing for Apple platforms there's not a huge loss when developing only for iOS 6+ (85% - 90% of users), whereas on Android you're pretty much required to target very outdated versions of Android as well. For example we target Android versions starting with Froyo.
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fnayr 4837 days ago
Whoa! Thanks for this! I would edit my original comment if it let me.

Still it is a hack that Apple could start disallowing at any time.

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wsc981 4837 days ago
I don't think the lipo tool will ever be regarded as hack. It's pretty much required when supporting multiple architectures / instruction sets. At some point there will likely be a ARMv8 architecture (if it doesn't exist yet).

Also many libraries make use of lipo to create convenient static binaries that can be used both in the simulator as well as on the device.

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fnayr 4837 days ago
Well what I mean is I believe Apple will start rejecting apps at the review stage if they see its built with armv6. (Of course it's just my guess).
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fnayr 4837 days ago
Here's the announcement from Apple: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=3212013b
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nicholassmith 4837 days ago
Not sure how that's been passed up in favour of talk about the UDID change. That's quite a big move from Apple really.
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