Today Apple announced their new iOS 4 Readiness Checklist. As a trailing sentence, almost as an afterthought, was this: “In addition, the App Store will no longer support applications that target iOS 2.x.”
That last sentence can be interpreted in several ways:
- You will no longer be able to upload apps to the App Store that target iOS 2.x.
- The App Store will really not support 2.x apps anymore and all such apps will therefore be removed.
The interpretation could have a significant impact on existing apps for several of our clients, so I called Apple for a clarification.
The official word is that going forward you will not be able to upload new or update existing apps that target iOS 2.x. All existing apps in the App Store will remain for sale even if they target iOS 2.x.
That of course is the sensible path. Although a general cleanup of the App Store to get rid of old apps that have not been updated since the 2.x days, might not be a bad idea…
July 2nd, 2010 at 16:48
but the ambiguity is the word “target”. by “target” do they specifically mean the “iPhone OS Deployment Target” build setting? i assume so, but i would like to have it 100% clarified 🙂
July 3rd, 2010 at 08:16
@bunnyhero: That was my question too. But unfortunately the folks at developer support are not technical, so I was not able to get an answer to this. My personal assumption is the same as yours, that it’s the “iPhone OS Deployment Target” setting that counts. One thing that supports this theory is that if you set “iPhone OS Deployment Target” to 2.x then you can’t build for multiple architectures (i.e. armv6 and armv7). If you try the app will be rejected upon upload by iTunes Connect. I’m assuming that there’s other magic as well that was added to 3.0 which can’t be taken advantage of if you build for a deployment target of 2.x.