Apple Reminds Developers About February 64-Bit Support Deadline for Newly Submitted iOS Apps

[GenesisST]

I guess I'm a little confused....It says Apple wont allow developers to submit 32 bit apps...what about all of us iPhone users who dont have a 5S or 6? We have 32 bit phones....correct? Are we being left out in the cold?

It means that apps will have to be submitted with at least the 64-bit binary. They will be universal binaries that include both 32-bit and 64 bit versions.

 

[TimelessOne]

I think iOS 9 will be the last version to support 32-bit iDevices, as well as, the discontinuation of the A7 and older processors in the next hardware refresh. I am basing this on the fact that Apple is requiring new and updated apps to be compiled with the iOS 8 SDK. This is in preparation for what Apple has planned in the next versions of iOS and OS X.

That is not way Apple does this. Apple always forces devs to move up to the latest Xcode and have to address all their undocumented changes.

 

[gnasher729]

Out of curiosity and in the simplest way possible for somewho has no knowledge of coding, what do you have to do and how much work does it take to make a 32 bit app into a 64 bit app?

The biggest problem is getting 64 bit versions of third party libraries. If you are using an old 32 bit library and the vendor of that library is gone out of business and not providing a new 64-bit version, you have a problem.

Apart from that, unless you are a truly incompetent developer who has been asleep for years, it's a switch in the compiler settings, and that's it.

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So this means that unless an app is developed ONLY for a 64-bit chipset, that apps will take up twice as much space? A developer wishing that his apps can be used by people with 32-bit iDevices and also 64-bit iDevices can submit both binaries in one package, therefore an app that is ½ a gigabyte in size will become 1 gigabyte in size... wasting all that extra space on users' iPhones -

32-bit users automatically get a 64-bit copy of the code that is of no use to them

64-bit users automatically get a 32-bit copy of the code that is of no use to them

Apple needs to find a better solution. Force developers to submit two separate copies of apps.

Then again, they probably won't. It's better for Apple if apps become unnecessarily bloated. They'll sell more 64 GB and 128 GB versions of their iDevices.

Code is a very, very small portion of most apps.

 

[TimelessOne]

It means that apps will have to be submitted with at least the 64-bit binary. They will be universal binaries that include both 32-bit and 64 bit versions.

Depends really. The libraries can be an issue if they do not have a 64 bit version you can us or it could require you updating your libraries which brings in a entirely new world of problems which can mean a lot of work as they could of changed how the api calls work.

As for your own app it still going to be an answer of it depends. Most of the app more than likely will be fine but the worry is the gotchas threw out the app. Big time if at one point you expect say an NSInteger to be 8 bytes long but now it is 16 bytes long. This changes role over points. It going to be some random things and those random things take a while to find and many never are until it is out in the wild.

It always deep under the hood stuff that cause problems.