Ever launch an app on your iPhone and then get a pop-up warning that says the app may slow down your iPhone? (I have old versions of certain apps, so it shows up for me every once in a while.) That warning usually appears when you’re using a 32-bit app. You can still run the app, and you probably don’t even notice the slowdown you’ve been warned about (at least in my personal experience).
Your ability to run that 32-bit app is coming to an end. As several other Mac sites have reported, Apple has updated the pop-up warning in the iOS 10.3 beta to say that the 32-bit app you’re running “will not work with future versions of iOS.” The warning goes on to say that the “developer of this app needs to update it to improve its compatibility.”
It’d be interesting to know if this actually affects all that many people.
It’s all about the hardware baby.
Can’t remove the 32-bit core in their ARM chips until there’s no 32-bit software left. That’s my opinion on their move here. It’s a good thing, if only iOS and the App Store weren’t an all-consuming black hole of software history — anything published there is basically consigned to eventual total non-existence. There’s no backup of the app store, no way to examine its history. If your favourite app doesn’t get updated, poof, I hope you’re able to maintain an ancient piece of iOS hardware indefinitely…
were not Apple the first to go to 64bit CPU’s?
Perhaps not.
AFAIK, it may mean that iPhone 5’s won’t get any more updates after iOS 10.x.
How many iPhone 5’s are in daily use? I would not have thought that many really.
If I am wrong, I’m sure that someone will correct me.
Remember that the 5c is basically a reskinned 5, and was only discontinued Sept. 2015 (two years later than the 5).
I tend to find that Apple’s policies are reasonable in isolation, but they produce some ugly side-effects. If the next iOS release is 64-bit only, the App Store should continue to display older, 32-bit apps for 5c users to download (as long as they aren’t purged), but developers will have no way to make critical patches available to their legacy app versions. So while the App Store has some “highest compatible version” logic, it doesn’t support branching, and Apple’s acceptance policy will reject important updates.
Does it really matter how many iPhone 5’s are out there? Point is that there are customers who purchased software legitimately that could eventually find out that they will vanish from existence should they have to reinstall the app.
I assume this means support for pre-64-bit devices will also come to an end? It’s not really surprising, and they have kept them updated for a long time by mobile standards.
Edited 2017-02-01 16:25 UTC
Only in the mobile phone space is a 500+ purchase considered outdated and old after a year of its release. Printers aren’t that way, a laptop can be perfectly functional and working for many years as well. But a phone? The OS stops getting updates, app updates break them, etc. Forced obsolescence so they can keep selling that premium phone…
I work with a guy who I think still uses an iPhone 5. Guess he is screwed.
Uh, do you even know what you’re talking about? The last 32-bit iPhone was the iPhone 5, in 2012. That’s about four and a half years ago. The last time I checked, 4.5 != 1. Now, if you were talking about Samsung, you’d have a valid argument.
Don’t make intentionally misleading statements when you are obviously intelligent and have valid points to make. It lowers your credibility.
If you are going to be pedantic and question someone’s credibility, then at least check your facts first.
The iPhone was released in September 2012 – true – but it wasn’t discontinued until September 2013.
So that means that some of them are only 3 years and 5 months old.
But even more incorrect was your statement that the iPhone 5 was the last 32-bit iPhone.
The iPhone 5 was *not* the last 32-bit iPhone. The last 32-bit iPhone was the iPhone 5C.
The iPhone 5C was released in September 2013, and the 16 GB model wasn’t discontinued until September 2015.
That means that some of them are only 1 year and 5 months old!
The 16 GB model was priced at $549 off-contract.
Do you think it is fair to make a $549 product obsolete after 1 year and 5 months?
To be slightly fair to Apple, this news isn’t actually saying that they’re dropping support for 32-bit phones, just that they’re dropping support for 32-bit apps _on_ 64-bit devices. I don’t think that they’re telling devs to stop making 32-bit builds in their fat binaries.
To me this suggests that they have plans to drop the AArch32 (ARMv7) compatibility from some future Axx processor, which would save silicon area, library space, OS complexity and, I believe, make it possible to make the AARch64 implementation faster and/or more power efficient. All good, IMO.
(I don’t doubt that they will eventually drop support for 32-bit phones: why wouldn’t they?)
They could write an emulator for 32-bit apps, given that A11+ chips are several times faster than A6 and predecessors.
But neo-Apple unlikely can do that. Just break/forbid/cut away.