Quote:
Originally Posted by OtinG
I certainly don't blame Apple for dropping the 32 bit app support. And yes, a lot of current developers are being lazy and cheap by not updating their apps. However, the biggest impact to me personally will be over freeware developed for my two hobbies of astrophotography and amateur radio (I'm a ham operator). It is rare to find any apps for these two niche areas, and unfortunately most of those were written long ago and do not support 64 bit. Since they were freeware, I cannot complain. I understand the authors not wanting to spend the time and money to update them. I used to publish a new book every few years to help people studying for the US Amateur Radio Extra Class exam pass their math portion. In the book I looked at each possible math question and showed how to resolve it. Since the question pool was updated every few years, I had to create a new edition of my book every few years. I sold it for only $0.99 at first only because Amazon would not let me list it for free several years ago when I published the first edition. Eventually they allowed me to list at for free, so I dropped the price to $0.00. The point was not to make money, but to help other hams on their more advanced exams. It took a lot of work to create each new edition, so I finally stopped doing that with the last question pool update. Too much time was required, and not enough energy left in my old bones! So I get why these app authors don't want to invest any more time in their old freeware apps. But it will still be an inconvenience to no longer have them on my main Mac.
I always wait until the final release of MacOS and iOS before installing. I prefer to let others find the bugs. And I prefer to wait and see how the new OS will effect speed and performance on my older devices. I'll decide whether to install Catalina in the Fall. I'm pretty sure I'll install iOS 13 on my iPhone XR and iPad Pro 9.7" though. The new iPhone XR will definitely have the power to use iOS 13, but I'm not sure about my older iPad as it is already a bit sluggish on iOS 12.
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Yep, niche apps are a problem from that standpoint. I have a weather station and scanner that are very much niche products. Those are the two big apps that I worry about each update. Fortunately the weather station is supported by a commercial app that is still actively being updated. The scanner is somewhat more problematic, but then again, I don't really use it all that often.
I have a laptop I install beta versions of macOS on. It's fairly vanilla. I install beta versions of iOS on my iPad mini, though they recommend waiting for the public beta unless you are actively developing for iOS 13. I only install official releases on my iMac and iPad Pro.
iOS seems to be a lot more likely to have orphaned apps.