I can find some recent internet posts noting that FlightAware dropped iOS 15 support, but at present it claims to support iOS 16.4 or later devices, which would include the 7 and 8 if updated. I don't use iOS 16 or FlightAware, so it's possible that they allow you to install it from the store and then do some runtime check and refuse to actually run, but that would be super weird behaviour.
I get why devs do this sometimes. iOS bakes a lot of support into the OS (so does Android, though increasingly because of slow uptake of new versions Google baking everything into the Play API), and iOS 16 is necessary for a variety of APIs, and even a lot of SwiftUI functionality if they went down that route. And then your APIs start changing so you end up invariably doing breaking changes so you can't just ignore the old versioned apps in the wild.
> I don't use iOS 16 or FlightAware, so it's possible that they allow you to install it from the store and then do some runtime check and refuse to actually run, but that would be super weird behaviour.
This is exactly what they appear to be doing. It should be against Apple’s guidelines to release an app that simply says “go away until you buy a new phone.”
Ah, sorry, mea culpa I thought the 7 and 8 were getting the same updates.
So the 7 is stuck on 15, and it is the one being left out courtesy of 15. Still doesn't address the submission though that is claiming this about the 8 and 16, which as of now is still very widely supported. I assume the author is just reading the tea leaves and predicting what is ahead. Eventually 16 will be deprecated too, though it isn't right now.
FlightAware on the App Store likely works perfectly, though it would require 16.4+ on devices like the 8 or newer. The "you can't use this anymore" is likely a startup API check on previously installed and no longer updatable versions.
I get why devs do this sometimes. iOS bakes a lot of support into the OS (so does Android, though increasingly because of slow uptake of new versions Google baking everything into the Play API), and iOS 16 is necessary for a variety of APIs, and even a lot of SwiftUI functionality if they went down that route. And then your APIs start changing so you end up invariably doing breaking changes so you can't just ignore the old versioned apps in the wild.