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iOS 10.1 Reinstates 32-Bit App Alert, Warns Older Apps May Slow iPhone

iTom17 said:
32-bits run fine on devices with a 64-bit CPU, just as it was stated during the announcement of the iPhone 5s and Apple's first mobile 64-bit chip. The problem is that 32-bit apps won't be able to take fully advantage of newer CPUs. In terms of basic performance you should be able to notice the difference without even that extra support, but in-app most of the advantage would come with the transition to 64-bit support.

That's why I do think developers really need to have their apps support this. And I'm glad that Apple included this warning.
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So the app will run fine, it just wont be able to fully utilize the hardware. I feel like a better message would be "This app may perform slowly" or something along those lines, not a message easily interpreted as "This app will make your whole phone slow"

Its a bit deceitful really.
 
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BlargKing said:
Also the message is too vague. Will the app run poorly, or will it somehow drag down the performance of the whole phone?
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The message is deliberately vague. Marketing fine tunes the wording of these dialogs to perfection. They are trying to scare users into being angry at developers.

Apple Engineering benefits when every app is recompiled every year on the newest SDK because it guarantees adoption of all sorts of behaviors that apps are opted into automatically. As long as there is this long tail of apps compiled with older tools against older SDKs, Apple has to choose between maintaining backward compatibility with older implementations and breaking apps outright. They have no problem breaking apps here and there, but they don't have the courage yet to do it outright for large classes of popular apps.

They know from usage metrics that there are still too many people using apps like Peggle for them to get away with outright breaking them, because the mainstream press would take notice. So instead they resort to FUD alerts designed to confuse and frighten users into abandoning their favorite old apps, and shaming developers into diverting their effort into changes for apps that are no longer profitable. It's an ugly scene, and everyone is being played.
 
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The question that I have is if they pull an App over this will it still be in my list of purchases, or does it disappear forever if I uninstall it?

Not sure I have any, but there may be niche apps that got abandoned that people still want to use. I would be angry if they pulled an app that I used and I had to make sure it never got deleted.
 
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My guess is this an efficiency/power thing. The 32-bit apps can't take advantage of the extra registers (which I recall developers made a big deal of when the 64 bit chips landed) and I can't imagine switching between 32-bit and 64-bit mode is terribly good on a mobile device either. Seems like ios 10 is the last stop for 32-bit devices but by the time iOS 11 hits the ipad 4 and iphone 5 will be roughly 5 years old and the 5c (never a terribly good idea imo) 4 years old. A bit under par for support for Apple perhaps but well over average for the industry.
 
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Kaibelf said:
If your app is so great, certainly you care enough to maintain it because you would want the end user to agree, right?
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Totally possible that it was a solo developer who is now dead and can't update what was otherwise a good app. I'm sure there is at least one case where this is possible.

Hopefully they don't remove the ability to run the older apps. I still enjoy an occasional game from the original iphone/3g and iOS 2/3 days, where sequels have followed but they aren't the same :)
 
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Andres Cantu said:
Good. No reason why apps should not be 64-bit compatible. It's been three years.
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Except it also means that app developers are effectively prohibited from making or updating apps for the iPhone 5, iPhone 5C, and any iPad older than the Air. I can't really say how many of those devices are still being used, but I didn't switch off my 5C all that long ago, and it's not like it was performing badly or anything. Those are all otherwise perfectly capable devices being forced into obsolescence through software policies.
 
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BlargKing said:
So the app will run fine, it just wont be able to fully utilize the hardware. I feel like a better message would be "This app may perform slowly" or something along those lines, not a message easily interpreted as "This app will make your whole phone slow"

Its a bit deceitful really.
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"<app> may slow down your iPhone" is what the message reads. That's kinda what you suggested it should be. :p
 
WestonHarvey1 said:
It will slow your entire phone down? Or just perform poorly while it is running? That message is pretty dire.
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Switching a processor’s execution state (that’s what needs to be done to run a 32-bit binary in a 64-bit OS, see also) is normally expensive and could indeed affect the performance of the whole system.
 
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redscull said:
Except it also means that app developers are effectively prohibited from making or updating apps for the iPhone 5, iPhone 5C, and any iPad older than the Air. I can't really say how many of those devices are still being used, but I didn't switch off my 5C all that long ago, and it's not like it was performing badly or anything. Those are all otherwise perfectly capable devices being forced into obsolescence through software policies.
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Does it mean that? They are showing warnings on 64-bit devices when 32-bit binaries are launched but are they prohibiting 32-bit binaries from being built to distributed to 32-bit devices?
 
Feenician said:
Does it mean that? They are showing warnings on 64-bit devices when 32-bit binaries are launched but are they prohibiting 32-bit binaries from being built to distributed to 32-bit devices?
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Honestly I don't know. But, they're at the very least coming across that way. And the "cleanup" process using 32bit as a flag for deletion means at the very least that 5C/etc owners may soon witness a lot of perfectly compatible apps disappear just because they don't also have an app version optimized for newer devices.

It's just a bogus deal to users and developers. Even if running 32bit apps legitimately impacts phone performance, Apple could have just put a list of "unoptimized" apps in the settings somewhere, like under the battery as a hint for improving performance. Kind of how you can see a list of apps hogging power. Instead, it's a popup to a user who can't actually take any action on it except to be annoyed. The user can't effect the compatibility update.
 
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weup togo said:
Apple is supposed to be a platform vendor. Platforms are supposed to be stable.
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Apple is providing mostly stable platform APIs, but they never shy from removing old crap. That's why both iOS and macOS are lighter than many other OSes (see Windows for example of OS where backwards compatibility is taken to the extreme).

BlargKing said:
I may be mistaken but can't 64 bit CPUs run 32 bit software just fine? Like my PC has a 64 bit CPU but 70% of my software is still 32 bit and I don't get alerts from Windows about it.
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32-bit apps require 32-bit system libraries - and the downsides are:
  • iOS has to include both 32 and 64 bit system libraries, increasing its size requirements
  • when 32-bit app is running both 32 and 64 libraries will be in memory, leaving less memory to the rest of the OS / app and increasing battery load
  • when first 32-bit app is launched the device will temporarily slow down due to iOS loading 32-bit libraries for the first time (and again, using extra battery)
 
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weup togo said:
The message is deliberately vague. Marketing fine tunes the wording of these dialogs to perfection. They are trying to scare users into being angry at developers.

Apple Engineering benefits when every app is recompiled every year on the newest SDK because it guarantees adoption of all sorts of behaviors that apps are opted into automatically. As long as there is this long tail of apps compiled with older tools against older SDKs, Apple has to choose between maintaining backward compatibility with older implementations and breaking apps outright. They have no problem breaking apps here and there, but they don't have the courage yet to do it outright for large classes of popular apps.

They know from usage metrics that there are still too many people using apps like Peggle for them to get away with outright breaking them, because the mainstream press would take notice. So instead they resort to FUD alerts designed to confuse and frighten users into abandoning their favorite old apps, and shaming developers into diverting their effort into changes for apps that are no longer profitable. It's an ugly scene, and everyone is being played.
Click to expand...
Users like you who apply the needed critical thinking keep me coming back to MR's forums.

Glassed Silver:mac
 
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I'm not in control of App developers. That popup would be so irritating, especially if it's an app that I was using a specific, old version of for a reason. Less so if it's a one-time thing, but still annoying.
 
So I don't get it. Peggle Classic hasn't been updated since 2014. It still runs great on my new phone and my iPad Air. It's still fun to play. Why should Apple remove it from the store? Hell, it's still making Apple money along with the developer when someone buys it.

There should be a category for "abandonware apps" that are no longer developed but still run on new devices. Plenty of great apps out there that still work fine despite being old.
 
weup togo said:
64-bit aside, don't play into Apple's spin that an app that hasn't been updated in a year is "outdated." This is a poisonous concept designed to screw users and developers alike by constantly driving churn on the app store. There were games written 30 years ago that still worked in Classic.

Apple is supposed to be a platform vendor. Platforms are supposed to be stable. But instead they're successfully convincing the apologists that only new things are good, and every not new thing is bad. Customers who buy into this are only hurting themselves.
Click to expand...

I see it differently. I see 32-bit as a proxy for other things, possibly security related, and now I'm going to review my apps and consider deleting any that aren't 64-bit.
 
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longofest said:
yeah... especially all that extra RAM
Click to expand...

Does it really matter, though? If an app is in the foreground and using a lot of RAM, who cares? You typically only actively use one app at a time in iOS.

If it's in the background and using too much RAM, it can be booted out.

I'm not sure what the problem here is. Especially with a game that doesn't run in the background at all.
 
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