teethdoc
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teethdoc
Silver Crowns paid for my airplane.
ForeFlight to drop iPad 1, iPhone 3G, iOS 5 support
- Thread starter flyingcheesehead
- Start date
Silver Crowns paid for my airplane.
flyingcheesehead
Touchdown! Greaser!
Liz,
You will need iOS 6 to run ForeFlight 5.4.
I don't have an iPad 2, but the mini is essentially a small 2 and it runs great on iOS 6.
Also, Apple's Maps app does have traffic, always has.
It never hurts to back up prior to a major upgrade.
azure
Final Approach
Kent,
Thanks for the reply. I thought I had deleted my post here (reposted under Technical Corner instead), but apparently the deletion failed. Sorry for any threadjack; please direct future replies to the new thread.
Thanks for the reply. I thought I had deleted my post here (reposted under Technical Corner instead), but apparently the deletion failed. Sorry for any threadjack; please direct future replies to the new thread.
BillTIZ
Final Approach
I'm thinking the same thing.
iOS 7 is just around the corner. iPad 5 is expected some time before Christmas with the A7X processor. Mini Ver 2 is expected this fall, unknown if it will have the A6 or A7 processor.
MBDiagMan
Final Approach
I have an IPad2 and 3G IPhone. It is just my luck that I renewed in July. My bad, for not paying more attention and trusting them to the nth.
It's pretty amazing that they would drop support for a device that's barely over three years old. I was thinking of trying out Foreflight, but not anymore.
I still might get an iPad at some point, but if I do, I'll have to justify it for reasons other than Foreflight.
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eetrojan
Pattern Altitude
I'm running iOS 6 on an iPad2 and haven't noticed any material difference.
And, my "Maps" app still has a "Show Traffic" or "Hide Traffic" button under the fold. Is there a difference?
MBDiagMan
Final Approach
Having spent the best years of my career filling many roles in software companies that developed and provided HMI software, I understand very well the challenges of keeping up with changing hardware and OpSys technology.
Leaving customers with legacy products hanging out to dry would develop a reputation that would make it VERY difficult to grow your business. Even if you label it as a legacy product and support it on it's orignal platforms, you MUST support your legacy customers to some degree if you wish to move forward in your market niche.
That said, there always comes a time, when the opsys and/or hardware platforms can no longer be modified or enhanced, leaving features frozen for the customers who wish to stay with their current systems. It's hard to believe that the hardware that I bought less than three years ago is at that point.
Doesn't WingX have an Android offering. Some time back, I saw where Garmin is entering this market. Anyone have experience with their offering?
A few weeks ago I came VERY close to buying a Stratus. Now I sure am glad that I didn't lay out all that cash
My $0.02,
Doc
Leaving customers with legacy products hanging out to dry would develop a reputation that would make it VERY difficult to grow your business. Even if you label it as a legacy product and support it on it's orignal platforms, you MUST support your legacy customers to some degree if you wish to move forward in your market niche.
That said, there always comes a time, when the opsys and/or hardware platforms can no longer be modified or enhanced, leaving features frozen for the customers who wish to stay with their current systems. It's hard to believe that the hardware that I bought less than three years ago is at that point.
Doesn't WingX have an Android offering. Some time back, I saw where Garmin is entering this market. Anyone have experience with their offering?
A few weeks ago I came VERY close to buying a Stratus. Now I sure am glad that I didn't lay out all that cash
My $0.02,
Doc
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Old guys like me find it jarring, because "I could care less" was not used at all when I was growing up. It was always "I couldn't care less."
Languages evolve, but that doesn't mean we have to like it!
Many consumers don't like being forced to do things.
azure
Final Approach
When I said no traffic I meant no real time traffic speeds. Yes there is a toggle to Show or Hide Traffic. With Show Traffic enabled I see construction tags in places, and red dashes along some routes that I'm guessing represent blocked lanes, but nothing like the old green/yellow/red markings showing traffic speeds. Some people are saying that it still shows yellow and red for slowdowns, but all I see is yellow everywhere.
Another example: People nowadays seem to use present tense (or technically, I guess, indicative mood) to refer to something that they want to happen or that should happen. This sounds odd to me, because when I learned English, present tense mainly referred to what exists in the present. I'm wondering if schools are no longer teaching subjunctive mood. This might seem trivial to some, but if you can't understand subjunctive mood, you can't understand the Constitution. Example: "...he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed..." Many people would now write that as "...he shall take Care that the Laws are faithfully executed...," which sounds to me like he is documenting the current state of law enforcement instead of causing it to happen.
denverpilot
Tied Down
I've been pleased with iOS 6 performance on the iPad 2 FWIW.
No complaints and I'm pretty much well beyond the burnout stage on tech that doesn't work properly, since that's the name of my existence on the planet.
The upgrade does a backup, but I'm a belt and suspenders kinda guy and forced a full backup and watched it to make sure it actually did all the steps without error prior to the upgrade. Then it did another one.
Main thing to do is set aside significant time for the upgrade. Apple wipes the device and starts from scratch so you'll have to re-synch all your media after the iOS upgrade completes. Depending on how much crap you keep on the device, hours. Don't forget you'll also have to re-download all of the charts and documents for Foreflight afterward also, plus a FF upgrade. Basically I set aside a half a day and checked on it once in a while. Once everything completed, I launched every app and regression tested that they all at least worked.
Did this on two iPads and two iPhones. Phones went first, they were not mission critical for flying.
flyingcheesehead
Touchdown! Greaser!
Your subscription will still be good, you'll still get all the new charts as they come out - You just won't be able to get versions later than 5.3.3 on your iPhone. (Your iPad is still good.) BTW, I remember people complaining that ForeFlight was almost unusably slow on the iPhone 3G at least two years ago - Are you really still using it on a 3G, or do you have a 3GS?
It bears pointing out that *Apple* dropped support for these devices a year ago - You can't run iOS 6 on them. That is the main reason that ForeFlight won't be releasing future software upgrades to them, as they'd be stuck with the iOS 5 API and be unable to take advantage of the new features of iOS 6 and 7.
ForeFlight is not the bad guy here - They're keeping the chart updates coming, as promised! But they have to make a business decision whether to support legacy devices and stagnate in the face of ever-increasing competition, or to continue to innovate and bring new features to the overwhelming majority of their users who have already upgraded their devices.
People, technology doesn't stand still, and you can't expect it to. If you have an older device, you'll still be supported - My choice of words for the subject line was poor - you just won't be able to upgrade past 5.3.3. The point of posting this thread was to alert you to the fact that you should upgrade to ForeFlight 5.3.3 *now*. App Store -> Updates. Go.
jesse
Touchdown! Greaser!
The point remains Kent that they could give a **** a little bit more, provide more warning then this which is essentially none, and provide a smoother path to continue to support the existing users until their subscription runs out. They chose to do this in the least graceful way possible, IMO.
retailguy
Line Up and Wait
Ok. Let me see if I've got this straight now. After all, I'm a poor uninformed android user, so I'm a little slow. (At least that's what you fine folk keep telling me.)
1. It's not Apple's fault because Foreflight stopped supporting the iPad 1.
2. It's not ForeFlights fault because Apple stopped porting the iOS operating system to the iPad 1.
So, I UNDERSTAND! It's NOBODY's fault.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to spend the rest of the evening updating my 4 year old nook color to android 4.2.2 and then I'm going to install Naviator on it, JUST BECAUSE I CAN. (It doesn't matter whether or not the manufacturer stopped supporting the device or not, because the community hasn't.)
I cannot wait to hear what else you guys come up with.
denverpilot
Tied Down
Incorrect. You can still reload and restore an older iOS device if it needs reloading. Plug an older device into iTunes and it'll put iOS 5 ok the device if it can't put iOS 6 on.
Also incorrect. Jesse is right, they need to fork so someone with an older device can still reload the App if they have to reload the device.
Doesn't matter if they're silly to still run the old device or if it's slow or whatever. A sudden release that makes it impossible to reinstall without a backup (yeah they're silly to not have a backup too, but sadly Apple doesn't back up Apps if you choose iCloud backup of a device, right? Not sure on that but pretty sure they expect you to reload from the App Store...) is wrong.
I'm frankly surprised Apple didn't provide a way to ask the device which iOS it's running and then use that information to be able to choose which code branch to run inside a "Universal" App binary. This was their methodology for OSX binaries, which gave plenty of time for folks to get migrated to the new OS and applications time to build in the new API support. Perhaps FF missed that window for iOS 5/6 already?
Anyway... I suppose they know or can find out how many users are still on iOS 5 easy enough. Their business call, not mine. I have been on the support staff during forced upgrades. Customers were never happy.
I remember in our biz, there were end-of-life and end-of-service/support announcements that had to go out, by law, in some States, a certain number of *years* before shuttering a particular system. Rarely enforced but they were there in some U.S. jurisdictions. VERY common in the EU. They may also want to check Canada. The inability to reinstall after a crash or hardware replacement would have violated laws in telecom, even after EOL. Only after EOS which was three years after EOL, could we refuse to help customers reinstall on new hardware.
I doubt said laws covered mobile phone Appa but I bet they weren't specifically exempted either. Just that we had much deeper pockets than any small software vendor so being targeted by a State for breaching their EOL notice and EOS notices resulted in heavy fines if we chose not to play.
If I recall, Commieformia was one of the tougher States. Minimum 3 year EOL notice and 3 year EOS. Once legal realized that, we had countdown day calendars on the wall and were ecstatic when we knew the phone call was changing from, "Free upgrade highly recommended..." to "There is no longer support for that profit..." (
denverpilot
Tied Down
Ha. Autocorrect. "product" not "profit".
flyingcheesehead
Touchdown! Greaser!
That's not what I said. I said that you can't run iOS 6 on old devices. You won't be able to run FF 5.4 on old devices either. In that realm, ForeFlight has supported these devices for a year longer than Apple has.
I'm sure that a business decision was made, with the data that only FF has available, that it was more important to avoid confusion on the part of new users as to which version to install than it was to fork the app in the store.
I'm sure that FF's stellar customer service folks will have a way of dealing with the situation of somebody needing to reinstall.
SkyHog
Touchdown! Greaser!
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Everything Offends Me
Kent - short of forking, a much, much more common way to handle this is to sunset support after a certain amount of time, based on a published schedule that is available WHEN YOU PURCHASE THE SOFTWARE.
To do anything less is disingenuous at best, and downright theft at worst.
Its a basic tenant of any respectable software company. Its unfortunate that ForeFlight either lacks a roadmap and has no strategic direction, or they've chosen to avoid doing anything to keep their customers up to date on their plans.
denverpilot
Tied Down
What's Wayne's phrase? "Assumes facts not in evidence."? We shall see.
Well I won't. The iPad 1 is making for a great paperweight up here on the desk in the kitchen.
FF licensing says two devices so it's on iPad 2 and iPhone 5. Both of which come along nowadays for every flight.
Still can't believe how happy I am not jacking around with paper charts anymore.
CodeMonkey
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CodeMonkey
I'm reading all the thread comments. Jesse, happy to speak on the phone with you (or anyone else) and get your feedback live.
This is our passion and doing the right thing is always top of mind.
-Tyson
ForeFlight / Co-founder
This is our passion and doing the right thing is always top of mind.
-Tyson
ForeFlight / Co-founder
JimNtexas
Pattern Altitude
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Jim - In Texas!
As a Windows developer and iPad 1 / FF user I have to express some sympathy for Foreflight.
There are only so many times you can write code like:
if [current os] then [Do something cool] else [disable the cool feature]
before you really complicate your testing and risk introducing bugs. And even if you don't introduce bugs, you have users of the old system starting to feel more and more red haired step children.
Perhaps this is a case where some tough love is indicated.
And as far as not being able to reliability back up your copy of the ForeFlight installer, that's not their fault.
It's a feature we iOS users should enjoy.
There are only so many times you can write code like:
if [current os] then [Do something cool] else [disable the cool feature]
before you really complicate your testing and risk introducing bugs. And even if you don't introduce bugs, you have users of the old system starting to feel more and more red haired step children.
Perhaps this is a case where some tough love is indicated.
And as far as not being able to reliability back up your copy of the ForeFlight installer, that's not their fault.
It's a feature we iOS users should enjoy.
I can understand not supporting old devices on the new OS after a certain point, but I don't see how the issues you raise justify making the old OS unavailable for those with old devices.
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
Concur. I have an iPad 2, and I am fully expecting this to happen to my device at some point.
Bottom line is that one needs to add the cost of a new device every 3 years to the cost of the subscription. If you get a 64 MB device, just figure another $700 (or $333 per year) in device amortization/replacement cost. It makes the move to electronic charts that much less compelling if you just fly VFR within a reasonable distance of home. MOST folks will continue to have operating older iPads when they are obsoleted. Heck, I have a 10 year old PC running Linux just perfectly.
TangoWhiskey
Touchdown! Greaser!
flyingcheesehead
Touchdown! Greaser!
It's the OS that is the issue. ForeFlight needs to be able to take advantage of features in the newer OS, it's the newer OS that doesn't support the old devices.
It's also not necessarily as simple as "if new OS, do cool new feature, else don't." Some of the newer features of iOS relate to memory management and stability. That's not something you can enable/disable with a conditional statement.
You mean $233/yr. But, you're also making the assumption that the device isn't useful for anything else. This isn't a Garmin device, it's good for a lot of other things too, and my iPad 1 saved me money in other ways as well.
I don't use FF as I prefer WingX, however when I did my comparison, I don't recall paying for the app, just the subscription which needed renewal. Am I mistaken?
You could just upgrade devices, I'm sure they would honor your new subscription on the new device, I'd also bet they will refund you if you get ****ed. When I decided to cancel and keep WingX, they refunded me.
jesse
Touchdown! Greaser!
You'd better understand how I feel if you did what I do for a living. I view their way of handling this as just plain lazy. I hate when people lazy their way out of developing software properly.
Lol, I understand, I just don't sweat the small stuff. In the light of all the stupid, lazy, shortsighted, or even downright evil business practices, this one ranks pretty low in my books especially considering how few iPad 1 and old iPhones are still in use.
Turningfinal
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Turningfinal
Lazy?
ForeFlight is a small team of individuals from what I gather. I'd rather them focus on bringing us bigger & better features than trying to figure out how to support users of legacy devices.
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
Yeah, I meant $233.
Actually, it costs me more money in other ways, with limited usefulness as a result of Apple's decisions to prevent the device from doing certain things. I've already documented how the limitations on the photo port & inability to write to outside memory make it un-useful for my photo work. No Flash has limited some web functionality on sites I use. And by impeding reload of the version of the software that works on the 1 (which can only be reinstalled if you have backed it up with iTunes), you lose one feature that makes the iPad useful: ability to reload software from the store if your device fails.
All in all, the iPad really adds little or nothing compared to what I get on phones & my netbook/desktop computers. Were it not for FF, I could not justfy the cost of owning it. And this decision puts even that justification on the edge.
I probably would not mind as much if this were on Android as those devices are much less expensive. But when it involves the premium-priced iPad, the proposition becomes very expensive, very quickly.
The inability to export images back to a chip is really annoying, it makes Photo Toaster, what I consider one of the best retouch programs out there, extremely limited in usefulness. The inability to view pictures on the chip in anything but thumbnail format before importing is also annoying.
retailguy
Line Up and Wait
This is probably the best summary that I've read of why I don't own Apple products.
One thing I came to realize is that if I purchased Apple, I had to do it "their way". Whether I wanted to or not. In the beginning that meant using iTunes. That changed, I guess. It meant buying pricey adapters to connect to other devices as Apple refuses to use the now industry standard micro/mini USB. Then when Apple decided to change the proprietary connector, you had to buy an adapter for that too... (And I was actually surprised they offered one).
But, as iPad 1 users are now finding out, you also bought planned obsolesence. While every manufacturer retires devices, it is more difficult to use when you're part of the apple infrastructure. I don't have much experience with the app store, but, I just don't understand why Apple would prohibit you from installing something you paid for. (Yes, I heard the discussion about ForeFlight vs Apple, and am not interested. This should be easy, and there is little reason it couldn't be, except, that is not part of the Apple model.)
I joked about my nook color a few pages back, but in a way, it's true. It is very simple for me to load a newer version of android on that tablet. It is also very simple for me to load an old/unsupported google play app or non google play app, on the device. All I need to do is manually move the apk from the web or my computer to the device and click install. I don't need a special cable, nor permission. In most cases I don't even need to root the device to install other apps. While that device is very old and somewhat slow by today's standards, it still works. If it had an onboard GPS, I probably wouldn't have bought a nexus 7. I still carry it as a backup, and it runs Naviator just fine with a bluetooth GPS.
I do wish I could run FF, but something will eventually replace it. Rarely does the first thing to enter the market survive forever as the market leader. There are becoming too many android devices for them to ignore that market forever. But now, they're way behind if they do try to enter. It'll be interesting to bump this thread a year from now and see how the market has changed.
denverpilot
Tied Down
Made me laugh today...
http://www.theonion.com/articles/apple-unveils-panicked-ideafree-man-at-launch-even,33814/
http://www.theonion.com/articles/apple-unveils-panicked-ideafree-man-at-launch-even,33814/
JimNtexas
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Jim - In Texas!
I could be wrong, but I think the Apple Store is designed to prevent application developers from offering an old and current version of the same product.
denverpilot
Tied Down
The old version must be called something else is all. "Foreflight Classic" for example.
I do think the Apple Store could be more intelligent about automatically offering the correct version (as provided by the developer) for a particular Apple product. But Apple is in the business of not selling you a product and supporting it for long periods of time, but obsoleting it so you need to purchase the next one.
Any long-time Apple user knows this. It's not possible to safely operate my original MacBook on the Internet because OS support has been dropped.
This used to be the MSFT model also but they've had to considerably lengthen support timeframes for Win XP for a long time now for fear they'd be labeled the destroyers of the Internet via millions and millions of zombies/hacked Win XP machines worldwide virtually overnight if they had cut off security patches when they originally intended. Hell, there's still government agencies using WinNT probably.
OS creators know how to make a completely or nearly completely secure OS. They can't because price points aren't even in the ballpark for anyone other than the largest organizations in the world to buy a copy. They instead wait and see where the bad guys poke at the soft underbelly of their OS and then plug the dyke as quickly as they can.