When the ability to support 64-bit apps was introduced to iOS, it didn’t come as a surprise as Apple slowly started to push developers towards that direction. In fact earlier this year there were signs that Apple was dropping support for 32-bit apps, but now a new report claims that with iOS 11, Apple will be dropping support completely.This is according to a series of tweets by developer Steve Troughton-Smith who claims to have heard that iOS 11 won’t have 32-bit app support at all. This means that if developers do not update their apps to 64-bit by then, their apps will no longer be usable on iOS. Apple have been issuing warnings that read, “This app will not work with future versions of iOS. The developer of this app needs to update it to improve its compatibility.”
Last month analytics firm Sensor Tower suggested that Apple’s move to 64-bit could end up obsoleting about 200,000 apps in the process. However we suppose this is just the natural progression of things and we reckon that for the most part, most of the major apps have already been updated already. It’s probably legacy apps and apps that have been abandoned/forgotten that will end up being affected by this, but either way hopefully developers who have yet to update their apps will do so.
(…and it sounds like future A-series chips won’t even include 32-bit support. Wonder if that’ll free up any performance/die space?)
— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) April 8, 2017