Why would a developer stop supporting an OS that’s only two years old? I imagine a few users (9% of you, as of this post) might ask that question when the next major TC updates drop support for iOS 7. I thought I’d put this out there for anyone who’s interested.

Some of the upcoming features in TC-11/Data require the latest tools Apple provides for rotation and layout. Unbelievably, Apple has rewritten the rotation system in every update since iOS 6, and with multitasking in iOS 9, the changes can no longer be ignored.

The choice is: support two totally different layout systems, or drop support for the old. It’s worth mentioning that the vast majority of my development time goes into layout. The amount of time to develop for two different systems would slow feature adoption and new projects to a crawl.

Xcode 7 no longer supports an iOS 7 simulator, and I’m down to a handful of physical devices still running iOS 7. You cannot downgrade devices, so I would be completely blind to any bugs / errors that users would encounter.

So it’s not a choice I took lightly, but I hope that the flow of cool new features will be worth the decision for most of my users.