He barely glazed over it in the WWDC Keynote on Monday, but Craig Federighi pointed to a list of iOS 8 supported devices, and it didn’t include the iPhone 4. Towards the end of the keynote, in particular after highlighting the many features that will be available to developers in the coming months, Federighi revealed that the beta of iOS 8 would be available by the end of Monday for all developers, and that the public would see iOS 8 in all its glory sometime in the Fall. Trailing behind that was a brief flash of the list of devices that the new OS would run on. Noticeably missing was the iPhone 4. Of course, this shouldn’t be much of surprise as older device models continuously get shaved off as iOS improves and the demands of features increases. Fortunately, it is only the one model that falls off the list as the rest of the devices seems to be the same as the one for iOS 7.
Having only one model dropped of the list of compatible devices for a new iOS nicely supports Tim Cook’s remarks about user adoption, which seems to be in part due to the fact that new features are available to as many older devices as possible. Cook compares this to Android where less than 10% of their users are using the latest version of the Android OS on their devices.
While this sounds impressive, Cook doesn’t go into the details of why this is or how it relates to the hardware. Regardless, it does seem significant that so many users of iOS devices have adopted the latest OS without major issues, so one can forgive that a device introduced in January 2011 has fallen off the supported list. I’m sure this is also due, in part, to the requirements of the newly introduced graphics system (Metal) that was also introduced, which will be covered in another post.