Apple has quietly updated the App Store so that owners of out of production devices can download older, compatible versions of applications.
Reddit user Justinbeiberispoop notes “People with old iOS devices: You can now install the last compatible version of an app that works on your device!”
An example of the prompt that the App Store provides is shown at right.
The new option addresses a common complaint among mobile musicians: owners of older devices have not previously been able to buy software once it has been updated for new versions of the OS.
Bout time.
i have a old ipad 1, this makes it a lot less useless. after all, i paid for all the apps.
Thank god. It’s about time. Now if they would just allow something similar on Apple desktop machines so we could load older versions of the OS on new machines.
That isn’t similar in any way to what they’re allowing here.
You want to run 9.1 on a new laptop or something?
It’s not going to happen!
It’s not as insane as it sounds – Apple stop you installing versions of OSX prior to the one that your machine shipped with. I got my machine just after Lion came out, and the same hardware was being sold with Snow Leopard for months, but because of Apple’s artificial limitation I can’t just buy a copy of Snow Leopard and install it – I’d have to jump through all kinds of hoops and hacks to get it working.
I wonder if they might add a preference for the App Store to hide/ignore all incompatible updates– so as not to torture the older iPad users with all the sparkly new features they can’t have.
That information is useful to people, like me, that have a mix of older and newer iOS devices. So in the app store, they SHOULD show you the features of the latest version.
I’ve got an iPad 1 and an iPhone 5 – so I want to know the new features, but also be able to download a version that will run on the iPad 1, if there is one available.
I wonder if you get to pay the current price for an old version of an app?
When you buy an app – you get to run it on all your devices, whether they are old or new, and you get the latest version of the software for that particular device.
If they cut the price somehow just for people that only have old devices, they’d have to charge you the difference when you upgraded to a new device, which would tick you off, or make developers eat the difference, which would tick them off.
Of course its good because i have ipod 2g, but they made the games use the new open gl 2.0, which ipod 2g doesnt support, we cant download an older app that doesnt need 2.0 dissapointed ;/