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iOS 11 is 64-bit only - 32-bit apps no longer work (i.e. some games)
- Thread starter Vashetti
- Start date
Sonic Rift
Member
I've lost a ton of purchased games to iOS updates already. This isn't surprising at all. There's no legacy protection on this platform.
I've also had games I've paid for turn free-to-play with ads and micro-transactions later. I've never considered anything on this platform to be permanent.
I've also had games I've paid for turn free-to-play with ads and micro-transactions later. I've never considered anything on this platform to be permanent.
NOLA_Gaffer
Banned
I'm actually trying to imply that the only way Apple is going to get people to ditch old technology and move forward is to force them to.
SlipperyFishes
Banned
It's the same problem that Microsoft have. People won't let developers move exclusively to 64bit because reasons this things are not able to progress as fast as they'd like.
TAJ
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
What's even more amusing is that in the early days of iOS people here were hyping it as superior to consoles because of BC.
eyeball_kid
Member
Yeah, it's a shame that it's just going to be lost.
The iPhone 5 and 5s are I think the oldest iPhones that support iOS 10, you could probably pick one up for pretty cheap. Maybe even the latest iPod Touch.
Yeah, I'm looking into that last iPod Touch now. Should do the trick if I'm reading this right, hmm...
StereoVsn
Member
I would recommend something line iPad Air, Air 2 or even just the "new iPad".
Well, it's not like the shift to all-64-bit is something that's happening to Apple. It's a choice they're deliberately making for the platform, and people (especially people who are used to the Windows paradigm of the platform maintainer prioritising backwards compatibility first and at all cost) get to disagree that it's the best one.
Mihos
Gold Member
Mother in laws don't care about 64 bit 32 bit stuff, only that her quilting app doesn't work and that was the whole reason she bought an Apple is so she didn't have to deal with all that technical crap
chrisPjelly
Member
That's a shame, but understandable if you don't want it to get in the way of progress. Regardless, people are being fucking ridiculous pinning this on "lol lazy devs". Doing what is essentially a port of a game that isn't probably making any more revenue is absolutely not their obligation.
Man so that means touch arcade won't work anymore. Which is the greatest app ever. No more notifications when my apps go on discount
Why don't they update the app?
I think they can (will) update, but they won't be able to do anything like app price tracking due to new submissions for approval needing to adhere to newer terms of service.
So it won't be as good amymore. They've been intentionally holding off.
iOS has always been pretty bad at preserving compatibility with unmaintained apps to begin with. This really shouldn't be surprising anyone at this point. It's just not a priority for Apple.
Any app you use that was abandoned by its developer will die on you eventually, not if but when.
Any app you use that was abandoned by its developer will die on you eventually, not if but when.
I read they won't because it cost too much money. And violates apple policy.
They've been bounced on updating before for "replicating App Store functionality".
Basically, you can't really have an app that functions anything like the App Store itself, even if it is curated or highlights things in a different way.
So they are stuck not able to update it without stripping out functionality or radically changing how it works.
BocoDragon
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
Has anyone shaken the remnants of Cave to see if they will just let their apps be delisted?
Theonik
Member
Please tell me how apple intends to remove transistors from my iPhone 7. (also lol)
It should. Otherwise, there won't be any progress. Windows is bloated because of that.
D
Deleted member 465307
Unconfirmed Member
Pardon my ignorance: what is the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit apps and OSs? What is the advantage of a program or OS being 64-bit? I've been watching the transition over to 64-bit for years now without really understanding what it means.
Because Ghost Trick has been patched at least once since 2015 that means it does has 64-bit compatibility.
Whether or not iOS 11 breaks something else in the game causing it to need another patch is a different question.
Theonik
Member
32-bit apps can only address up to 4GB of RAM. 64-bit is the way forward and iPhone has had a 64-bit SoC for years now. iOS has also long moved on. The problem is that many applications have not made the transition for various reasons and so with apple dropping BC that means they won't work anymore.
In the case of ARM, they're significantly different architectures, bitty-ness aside, with Aarch64 being more modern, efficient, and powerful than Aarch32. You might as well think of it as going from PS2 to PS3, with Apple/Sony removing backwards compatibility four years down the line.
The 4 GB per app barrier can also be broken by moving to a 64-bit architecture, but that's only important for the future.
Broken Hope
Member
This change should be even more fun to be honest.
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/06/apple-to-phase-out-32-bit-mac-apps/
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/06/apple-to-phase-out-32-bit-mac-apps/
Rushersauce
Banned
Am I missing something here?
Quadraphonic
Member
Ignoring random security and other things, it allows access to more RAM.
But to convert apps, they don't need to do much other than open up the game and recompile it. The problem is anything that old probably has a ton of other legacy issues preventing it from being re-published on the store in the current state, like certain assets have to be updated/added/removed, libraries changed, SSL encryption updated, a lot of that crap.
Keeping stuff on the iOS store is a pain in the ass.
Remembrance
Member
The Apple ecosystem seems like an endless chase for a future that never arrives. The mandatory feature you're forced to add today will just become another legacy feature that breaks your compatibility tomorrow.
oh that sounds bad
I feel Mac users are more used to this? Like I've been on OS X since 2005, and this is the... fourth major compatibility-breaking transition I can think of off the top of my head - PPC->x86, Rosetta removed, Carbon deprecated, and now 64-bit only.
Having it happen to iOS users, a whole lot of who are used to the perma-compability paradigm of Windows, is a lot more disruptive.
Broken Hope
Member
It's better than the Android system where you end up with stupidly out of date apps that look like crap. At least Apple try and force apps to use the latest features and look/feel like modern apps on the current OS.
Grim Patron
Member
Android is open source!!!111
Iced_Eagle
Member
First, how come with the exact same hardware when I upgrade my iPhone to iOS11 I lose access to my apps? It's not like my hardware got changed in the process of an OS upgrade. Thus, for all current hardware it totally is a software thing. Apple can absolutely provide a software solution if they spent the time and resources.
Hell, in Windows 10 they're adding the ability to run x86 applications on ARM... Completely different architectures, but in Windows they can hook everything up behind the scenes with an emulation layer.
Here's a video of them installing 7zip from the dev's website on an ARM machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeOQp5V7EgM&t=4m06s
And, if I recall correctly, the 32/64 bit emulation mode in Windows (WOW64) handles other cases as well, because if you're on an Intel Itanium processor (IA64), those don't have 32-bit compatibility within hardware and thus WOW64 does more of its work in software. Obviously, your standard x86-64 processor can support both at the hardware level. You do lose some performance this way, but at least your damn applications will run.
So again, Apple can absolutely solve this problem if they devoted the time and engineering resources to maintaining backwards compatibility. However, it's quite simply not a priority when they want to simply move forward and because they are completely in control of the ecosystem. Sure, all iPhones moving forward are probably going to be 64-bit only at the hardware level, and it does save disk space and performance to not have emulation be a part of the OS. However, none of those are technical blockers but Apple has shown that backwards compatibility isn't as important to them than other priorities they have.
Eh, it's a bit more complicated than that to move an app to 64-bit than just recompile it. Generally, your own app is not a huge problem (though all of the points you brought up are totally valid and important). When porting, the trickier part is that all of the dependent libraries need to be 64-bit. It can be a deal breaker, especially if a library you were dependent on is no longer updated or has a 64-bit version available. Once you go switch around your underlying libraries, that's where things can start getting really funky real fast. And obviously depending on the complexity of your app, with memory layout and patterns being different, that can always expose issues which may have gone unnoticed for years. Then there are all of the other issues you brought up, which are certainly a PITA and can totally be a detriment when it comes to a developer who may decide just to leave their app behind than deal with that.
Theonik
Member
It's not always as simple as recompiling. Every component of the application needs to be re-compiled in 64-bit and some applications, use 3rd party libraries that might only have been licensed as binaries or only available as 32-bit binaries. They would have to replace those binaries somehow that might mean significant re-writes. Also for games, you might have a lot of code that is doing some funky (but performant) stuff that might break from the subtleties of 64-bit or you might expose existing bugs.
I have several applications on my iPhone that don't support retina properly or more commonly not the @3x scale on the plus devices...
Broken Hope
Member
Yeah Apple really sure require devs to support the bigger screen resolutions by now, the 6 and 6+ came out ages ago.
JamesJoyce1882
Member
Same here, it's why I refuse to spend more than $1-2 on iOS games today and in total spend less than 10% of what I used to a few years ago.
I just hope all my Cave shmups will eventually be ported. Loosing those would hurt the most.
This remember me when there was the change from Windows 32-bit to 64-bit and the outrage...
I don't like Apple, at all, but in this case I don't blame them for that decision... but for sure there should be a BIG warning before the update of the OS to let people now that. So that everyone can choose if do the update or not. Also an automatic list of apps owned that will became not compatible would be a good thing.
I don't like Apple, at all, but in this case I don't blame them for that decision... but for sure there should be a BIG warning before the update of the OS to let people now that. So that everyone can choose if do the update or not. Also an automatic list of apps owned that will became not compatible would be a good thing.
SmokedMeat
Gamer™
Theonik
Member
But then I have no idea what you are trying to say.
I think Broken Hope meant "Apple really SHOULD require devs to support the bigger screen resolutions by now".
And Apple does require higher resolution support (since 2012/2013 for Retina, more recently for iPhone 6/+, which is less than 3 years old), just like Apple requires 64-bit support (recommended since 2013, mandatory since 2015). However, old apps haven't been delisted or otherwise removed from the App Store; Apple's finally doing so now, and look at this thread full of complaints.
Theonik
Member
That's not what his first post was about.
MS depreciated 16-bit, not 32.
And I dunno if I said in this thread but this is a fucking outrage. There are several apps which do not yet have a suitable replacement that Apple is about to wipe out. *posting from the last iPad ever to have a headphone port, which is also sad*
https://apple.slashdot.org/story/17...-out-32-bit-mac-apps-starting-in-january-2018
I mean.. come on.. even Microsoft is shipping a version of Windows 10 that runs on ARM and just runs x86 applications without an user having to set up a VM.
I mean.. come on.. even Microsoft is shipping a version of Windows 10 that runs on ARM and just runs x86 applications without an user having to set up a VM.
As an iPhone owner, I disagree. I'd rather not lose access to apps that have ceased being updated. Especially games! Those actually cost money.
Taliban Stan
Member
People shouldn't be too shocked. When they switched to Intel processors they were like "99% of old software in incompatible, but we're making up for this by making sure the next full number update (which of course is paid) is the first update that works on our new systems. Some programs will be left behind those are stupid dumb programs from stupid dumb companies so who cares?!"
People fussed and a decade plus later when we're removed from it we can see that it meant literally nothing for Apple. I imagine this will be the same. People will complain but nobody will care enough to actually do something tangible like stop using Apple products or hold off on updating immediately.
People fussed and a decade plus later when we're removed from it we can see that it meant literally nothing for Apple. I imagine this will be the same. People will complain but nobody will care enough to actually do something tangible like stop using Apple products or hold off on updating immediately.
The new iPad models they announced this week still have headphone ports.
Yeah it seems like games are really the big loser with this change. We all know the stories of Square's terrible foray into mobile, or the BioShock port, etc. Unless it's a continued revenue game like the Candy Crushes or Monument Valleys, there's not a lot of incentive to update. I've got stuff like the port of Spectre or Marathon I'm sure won't end up working (haven't checked in a while.)
Not actually true, in that Rosetta worked with a huge number of PowerPC apps before they got rid of it. There was a grace period of nearly five years before Rosetta was removed in OS 10.7.
But yeah, Apple has given people ample warning with big changes like this.
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