iPod Touch 4 and installing new apps

By Deborah Armstrong, 3 January, 2014

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

I've noticed lately, when I acquire an app, or try to, that it will start to install, and then a screen will appear telling me I need to update to iOS 7 first.

My iPOD Touch 4G can't update to iOS 7. At first, I thought this was only an issue for new apps that had never been designed to be compatible with iOS 6, but I've noticed that even when I try to get some old app that worked on iOS 6 before, like GarageBand, that iOS7 is now required.

This is frustrating, because if I'd gotten the app a few months ago, it probably would have downloaded fine. Luckily this hasn't yet happened with something I actually tried to buy, but it worries me.

Shouldn't the app store be smart enough to know I cannot update to iOS 7? And why doesn't it offer me an older, compatible version of the app if one exists?

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Comments

By Piotr Machacz on Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 18:07

From what I heard, Apple supposedly recently added a feature where the app store should download any older version of an app, the last release that your iOS device supports, which should work in most cases. However, a recent trend with developers is to pool an older version of an app to release a new one, optimised fr iOS 7. They mostly do this so they can charge for the updates, which is something they can't do with just an update to an existing app. The side effect of this, of course, is that the app store has only that new version. Having said all that, I have no idea why garageband is doing this. This is a very vain memory, but my friend might have told me that an old update to garageband that came out last year before iOS 7 dropped A4 based devices.