Minimum System Requirement Changes Coming

Drafts 28 is coming in the next couple of months. The actual release date will depend on when Apple releases the final versions of iOS 15, watchOS 8, and macOS 12, but I wanted to make people aware of planned changes to the minimum system requirements for Drafts in this release.

Beginning with Drafts 28, the minimum OS versions support will be:

  • iOS/iPadOS 14.1 or greater (was iOS/iPadOS 13.4)
  • watchOS 7.1 or greater (previously watchOS 5.0)
  • macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) or greater (no change)

This represents no change to Mac requirements, and leaves no devices behind on iOS as any device capable of running iOS 13 can (and should!) update to iOS 14. It does mean the Apple Watch app will no longer be available on Series 1 and 2 Apple Watches.

We try to maintain backward compatibility when reasonable, but we canā€™t allow supporting older OS versions to prevent the app from moving forward with new capabilities (like an all-new Watch app!)

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You may get some pushback for abandoning iOS 13. iOS 14 contains some controversial changes, e.g. Safari tab handling. It might wind up being one of the more reluctant OS transitions (ala Big Sur).

No, not too worried about dropping iOS 13. Only a few hundred active users for all versions of iOS 13 combined in the last 30 days, and those people can update.

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Good Notice - Thankyou

I have course know nothing about your user base ā€¦ but if I were to guess - I think it would be a group of people that keeps up with OS updates ā€¦ Drafts is not just ā€˜any old appā€™ ā€¦ so little fall out.

CAVEAT : regularly demonstrably wrong about many things!

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Drafts is not a ā€œpublic serviceā€ but it would be doing the public a service in being another nail in the coffin of iOS 13.

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The main issue is leaving hardware behind. Iā€™m still supporting macOS 10.13 because there are still quite a few people with old Macs that cannot update past that version. In this case, the only hardware Iā€™m leaving behind is Apple Watch Series 1 and 2, and there are not that many of those out there in the scheme of things.

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@Jimmbo Itā€™s iOS 15 that has the upcoming lousy Safari changes

iOS 13 is from 2019 (better for security to leave it behind)

Apple will surely keep patching security issues in iOS 13 as they arise for a while.

Just to note that Apple walked back its controversial handling of Safari tabs for iOS14, so Iā€™m no longer as concerned about this.