By Piotr Machacz, 20 December, 2013
Forum
Other Apple Chat
After someone mentioned the topic of not being able to update an entry, which later turned out to be a device issue, I figured I might as well bring up something I was thinking about after the 5S came out.
The current list of "devices this app was tested with" was condensed in a few places where it doesn't necessarily work all that well, mostly because of how big the generation gap is. For example, the iPhone 4/4S. They do look the same, and both run iOS 7, but the 4S has a much better CPU, which in many cases makes the app have reduced functionality or not even work at all. So, if someone with a 4S makes an entry, and then someone with an iPhone 4 buys the app and discovers it doesn't work, well... yeah. Also, there may be apps that work on the 4S all the time, but crash on the 4 because it has less resources, or, at least, cause more lag.
Similarly, the gap between the iPhone 5 and 5S. While the 5 and 5C are comparable, the 5S is, in some places, 2X faster. And while this isn't the case yet, something tells me in a few years we may see 64-bit apps that will work on the 5S, but not the5, and with the current system people might run into the same issue.
I can see 2 ideas of fixing this. The first would be to simply again separate the list, EG iPhone 3GS, 4, and 4S, then the iPhone 5/5C could be one entry and the 5S could be separate. The second could be rather than separating by device, you could separate By CPU EG. Older than A4 (iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 3), Apple A4 (iPhone 4, iPod 4, iPad 1), Apple A5 (iPhone 4S, iPod 5, iPad 2, iPad mini 1), and so on, This would certainly make the list a bit cleaner, but doesn't separate iPhones and iPads as well (The iPad 3 and 4 did run on A5X and A6X CPU's so they're separate), but the new generation runs the A7 just like the %s.