Why does it require iOS 7.0?

MProgrammer · on Oct 30, 2013

Because it's a new app, and actively doing work to support anything older than iOS 7 is a waste of time.

Zakuzaa · on Oct 30, 2013

Unless the app uses some iOS 7.0 specific API, it makes sense to support at least 6.xx considering 7.xx is just over a month old.

alex_c · on Oct 30, 2013

The UI changes in iOS 7 make supporting both 6 and 7 more of a pain than most previous iOS releases. Certainly possible and not a huge deal, but it doesn't just come down to iOS 7 specific APIs.

MProgrammer · on Oct 31, 2013

Supporting iOS 6 is a non-trivial amount of work for many apps. Furthermore, you also have to test on iOS 6, and on more devices.

All that for a piece of the market that now amounts to 25% and is shrinking every minute.

mangotree · on Oct 30, 2013

To target a lower iOS can be as simple as selecting from a menu. For most apps, it really is as simple as changing the target to iOS 5.0.

interpol_p · on Oct 31, 2013

You actually need to test your app on the lower deployment target.

There are quite a few crash bugs that are specific to, say iOS 6.0.1, but work fine in 6.0 and 6.0.2. And there are definite style and layout issues when using UIAppearanceProxy stuff on iOS 6 and iOS 5 (iOS 5 having a larger number of bugs related to this API).

Supporting both iOS 6 and iOS 5 is actually hard work and days, if not weeks of additional testing and bug reports.

Supporting iOS 7 and iOS 6 is much harder, since you have to have two different designs — you'll need separate code paths to style the app nicely on both versions.

jaredsohn · on Oct 30, 2013

You also need to do QA on the older version(s).

(That said, I personally appreciate allowing it to work with older versions since I haven't upgraded to iOS 7 yet and waited a long time to upgrade to iOS 6.)