That's the name of the game with Apple development, unfortunately. Every year, I get excited for all these cool new SwiftUI features at WWDC and wait 2+ years to actually use them.
I actually think that Apple intentionally makes compelling features just so they can drive people to newer versions of the OS (and therefore to newer phones).
Well for two years in a row they did not remove support for iPhones. So iOS 15 will support the same devices as iOS 13 did. So it seems they are now less driving people to new phones.
I think the emoji are more driving people updating the OS than any features. And developers will only update their minimum target if people leave behind that version.
The jury is still out on "less driving" (though my intuition agrees with you).
Here are some things that they are doing to "softly drive" people to newer phones:
- Emoji
- iMessage features (like Memoji stickers)
- Non-resource-intensive privacy features (such as choosing individual photos for an app to access)
- Pushing app developers to newer SDKs (which makes them change code and put in more work to support older iOS versions even if they can after making use of a new API)
- Extra RAM usage for the iOS versions due to additional background tasks that cannot be disabled
There are more (as a long-time device user I regularly see examples), but I'm limiting myself to 15min on this reply.
Oh, absolutely. I got excited for the SwiftUI .toolbar modifier last year. It was wildly broken during the betas, and they just... didn't fix it for iOS 14's launch.
No idea if it works now, but definitely a lesson in the dangers of the new and shiny.
