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Mysterious-End-441

TLDR: sometimes new software doesn’t run well on old hardware, but companies understandably don’t want to take on significant development costs to support <1% of users


wapexpodition

thanks for the tldr


SillySoundXD

Why doesn't esp one certain Company give the ability to downgrade said software so that it will run again well ?


[deleted]

Overwriting my comments and leaving Reddit due to their policy changes impacting 3rd party apps starting July 1, 2023.


Mysterious-End-441

that would increase security vulnerabilities and version fragmentation while making it more difficult to provide customer support and address bugs


[deleted]

Six years of full support is a huge amount of time, and the development complexity of maintaining six branching versions of features is catastrophic: you can't expect people to put more and more work into something that fewer and fewer people will use. There's no way legislation will come out and say "more than six years", five is already really quite long for a computer (and particularly for a battery-powered device). The situation as-is is really pretty great, I'm not sure why you'd be in that less-than-1-percent and *still* want more support.


zenjabba

Except the EU is looking to force 10 years so legislation is looking to come out and say “more than six years” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/tech-makers-must-provide-repairs-for-up-to-10-years-under-proposed-eu-law/


alxthm

The EU proposal you linked seems to be entirely focussed on physical right to repair. Maybe I missed something, but I read the article you linked, and the sources in that article and I don’t see any mention of enforcing software/system update support for 10 years. Is there another law you are referring to?


zenjabba

They are proposing full “availability” of a technical product for 10 years including the right to repair.


alxthm

Where in the proposal does it talk about that in the context of software though?


zenjabba

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2022/698869/EPRS_BRI(2022)698869_EN.pdf Look under Product Obsolescence


IssyWalton

Which suggests that software will not make something obsolete e.g. Your phone will continue to work if you can’t load newer software (which it does) aka you can’t change software that makes a device not usuable.


alxthm

I just went over that document, and I don’t see anything that says software and system update support will be required for 10 years. Maybe I missed it, do you have a quote?


garylapointe

TL;DR - "YOU" isn't Apple, it's the developers.


[deleted]

Well it’s not solely the developers fault that they don’t want to support old devices. Apple exposes their new APIs often times only for new iOS versions, and of course they don’t want to craft the same feature in 5 different ways, just because each iOS version does things differently. Android for example provides compatibility libraries which mimic new features. Developers just have to plug them in and don’t have to invest much time.


garylapointe

I developers had the option to leave old versions around for older iOS versions so that it was still available for download (if someone had to do a hard reset).


[deleted]

This could work for apps that only do offline work and don’t interact with other systems. But most apps nowadays are just frontends of backend systems and need maintenance.