Apple will potentially make hundreds of thousands of apps incompatible with iPhones and iPads with iOS 11. It concerns 32-bit apps, while iOS 11 will probably only run on devices with 64-bit processors, Wired reports.
Since mid-2015, Apple has required apps that come to the App Store to have support for 64-bit processors, but there are still 187,000 apps in the App Store that are not, Wired claims based on figures from analyst firm Sensor Tower. These are apps that received their last update before mid-2013, when Apple released the first iOS device with a 64-bit processor with the iPhone 5s. Before that phone came out, it was not possible to add support for 64bit processors to the apps.
It’s unknown if Apple will actually drop support for 32-bit apps with iOS 11, but that’s likely. The 2012 iPhone 5, 2013 iPhone 5c and some iPad models are the last 32-bit devices to receive an update to iOS 10, but support for them is likely to end after more than three years. Apple hinted at that in a beta of iOS 10.3.
Developers with such apps could make their program compatible with iOS 11 by adding that support anyway. If Apple keeps the same schedule as previous years, the company will announce iOS 11 in June during its own developer conference WWDC, with a release in the fall.