Panels on older devices?

#1

Hi, I wanted to check if Panels supports older ipad devices. I have an old ipad that i want to repurpose as a full time comic reader. I tried to install Panels and it made me install an older version of the app.

Now I dont know what exactly goes into making it compatible and I can imagine that it would require some (or a lot) of development, but I wanted to check if it would be possible.

I think it would be really great to be able for users who want to use older ipads

For reference, I have an ipad 4 running ios 10.

Thanks

#2

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

Many of the features are built using tools that don’t even exist on older versions of iOS.

The AppStore always provides the latest compatible version. Right now, the latest version of Panels supports iOS 15+. We always try to support the latest and second-to-last versions. We also try our best to keep supporting the oldest version we can. Right now, we are supporting the four latest versions (15, 16, 17, and 18). But at some point, we will have to drop support for iOS 15 so we can use modern development tools.

I hope that makes sense.

#3

of course. that makes sense. i imagine even supporting ios 15+ is also a lot of work.

Just to confirm though, are all Panels features available for devices ios 15 and up?

And as a follow up question, this is just for my curiosity.

Are there any features that you can add to the app in the newest ios (ios 18) but wont add because those features wont be supported in the older ios versions (ios 15,16,17) ?

Thank you again!

#4

Are there any features that you can add to the app in the newest ios (ios 18) but wont add because those features wont be supported in the older ios versions (ios 15,16,17) ?

In most cases, that only happens with Apple features that are only available in modern iOS versions. For example, Live Text is only available in iOS 17+ because it uses an API in iOS, which is only available in iOS 17+.

Normally, we don’t introduce iOS limitations ourselves. And it’s very hard to foresee when something like this could happen.

The system APIs also limit us. Let me give you a concrete example.

This is a portion of the interface of Apple’s URL class API

image
image1390×502 138 KB

As you can read there, appendingPathComponent is deprecated, meaning we shouldn’t use that method anymore, and it soon will become unavailable.

To work-around that we could do something like this in our code

image
image865×183 31.4 KB

To use the newer function in iOS 16+, and the older version in previous versions.

That is fine depending on how many of those are. We only branch out the code once, otherwise it becomes unmanageable. If we can completely isolate a feature without polluting the rest of the code, that’s the easiest case. We only make one feature available in one version+ and that’s it.
But when Apple makes foundational changes, and that forces us to branch the code too many times, we normally bump the minimum iOS version. Otherwise, it would be like developing many apps simultaneously.

The bottom line is that we don’t take lightly dropping support for old iOS versions.
But we’re a small team and can only support so many code variants.

Fortunately, Apple has recently extended the number of devices supporting reasonable new versions.

I hope that makes sense.