Moving to a new iOS

While you are developing for iOS you are regularly facing the new iOS version releases. Some of them go smooth and your initially built app continues working fine. Like, you can simply skip newly deprecated functions. However, major versions may simply not allow your application to compile, run and be loaded into the App Store.

From one hand the new operating systems bring in the new abilities as iOS 9 did with app thinning feature but at the same time, you may need to support the new devices as well (mostly on the UI side).

Thus, there are 2 things you have to perform in order to bring your app back to life towards the new iOS.

First, make it compilable and runnable on the new environment. In order to do so, you’ll need to update your XCode and then perform the following:

  1. Update project configuration setting, such as transport security, bitcode and so on;
  2. Fix current frameworks and libraries (such as Cocos2d or similar).

Then adjust a device support in order to have your app looking nice on new devices. The major pain is the ‘Plus’ versions of iPhone and Retina iPad models that may require your whole graphics redraw for the bigger resolution. This, for sure, is more relevant to games and animations, however, may have an impact on your business app as well.

So, the steps are:

  1. Create new graphics according to new resolutions (2x, 3x or 4x…);
  2. Update project to use new graphics for the devices of that resolution;
  3. Add those images to resource folder.

So, even though it all takes some time, everything is doable and your great app will continue to delight your users.