About 187,000 Apple iOS apps may be removed with the next update to the company’s mobile operating system.
Apple watching website’s Cult of Mac and 9 to 5 Mac say that Apple intends dropping support for old 32-bit apps when it brings out its next iOS operating system iOS 11 later this year.
This follows a transition of iPhones from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture.
Apple’s iPhone 5s released in September 2013 was its first phone with 64-bit architecture.
When it was released, the App Store began supporting 64-bit versions of apps which are faster and use memory more efficiently but old 32-bit versions remained too.
As successive Apple devices were released, the company began to transition away from 32-bit apps, telling developers that from February 2015 the app store would no longer accept new 32-bit app submissions.
Now 32-bit apps won’t run at all with the iOS 10.3 Beta 2 — a version available to the developer community.
This has fed speculation that iOS 11 won’t support 32-bit apps.
Officially Apple is not confirming the move. Indeed it’s possible that the final iOS 11 may support 32-bit apps as Apple’s final product in the past has not necessarily reflected developer Beta versions.
But a warning notice in the iOS Beta version when running 32-bit apps that “this app will not work with future versions of iOS” suggests the decision has been taken.
Cult of Mac reported last month that 187,000 apps, about 8 per cent, were yet to be converted to 64-bit.
