Psamathe wrote:BBC Radio iPlayer app/service has been closed by the BBC (or will be closed within a few days). Nothing to do with Apple. All apps on all platforms tend to only support a limited number of older operating systems - mainly because new Operating system introduce new features and apps need to use those features to stay competitive and maintaining old versions for long term represents a significant cost.
True. I put the blame entirely on Apple, rather than app producers, for orphaning old devices when they do OS upgrades. That's largely deliberate; app writers will (reasonably) use those features, and users of old products are forced to upgrade.
If Apple actually cared, they'd make their new OS offerings compatible with old hardware, just disabling features that require the latest hardware advances. For example, they could implement a flashy new UI feature in a very basic way on old hardware, such that an app using that feature would still work, albeit less impressively.
However, they don't care. They'd rather everyone had a no-compromise experience when using Apple, even if that means replacing your hardware every couple of years. For me, that regular fiscal offering to Apple (whilst also discarding perfectly good hardware) was too much of a compromise.
My worst experience was in, I think, ios8 where they rewrote the photo API in a way that was incompatible with their own iPhoto, a paid app. And the only warning you got was after upgrade, when the app would no longer start up. Fortunately, I had it on two iPads, one of which is still limping along on that old version of iOS.