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iphoneobjective-ciosxcodeios4

How can I support both iOS 4.X SDK and iOS 5 SDK in my iPhone app?

I am writing an iPhone app in which I want to support the largest user base possible at this point in time (with minimal pain), so I decided that targeting IOS 4.3+ would be a good subset of users for my audience.

I started working in XCode 4.2, but reverted back to XCode 4.1 when I realized that the project templates had changed and everything seemed very intertwined with storyboarding, ARC, etc.

I have built out my application to the point I actually want to test on my device, which has iOS5 installed. When I attempt to use it though, I get this message as soon as I click 'use for development' in Organizer/XCode:

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The project's build settings look like this:

enter image description here

My Question Is This: How do I get this application, built in XCode 4.1, to run on both iOS 4.3 and iOS 5 phones?

Are iOS SDKs not backward compatible? I come from Android development in which a less than current SDK will generally work on a newer SDK - is this different in the iOS world? And if so, how is this handled typically?

Any direction on how I should proceed would be greatly appreciated.

Solution

  • You can go ahead and open your app in Xcode 4.2 and it should still work. I've been working on a particular app since Xcode 3.x days and I'm nearly done, chugging along in Xcode 4.2 right now. It shouldn't be a problem. If you want to work with Xcode 4.1 you will be fine, but you won't be ale to use new features introduced in iOS 5.

    There are several aspects of "cross-version" development to note.

    1. Testing: You can only test on version of iOS that are included with your SDK, or that are installed on physical devices that you may have. The SDK generally comes only with the latest iOS, sometimes the previous one is included as well, but since Xcode 4 was released, the older SDKs have been progressively deprecated with each release. This is not to say that your app which is linked against the iOS 5 SDK won't run on older versions of iOS. It just depends on how you implement new features.

    2. Features: In order to support older versions of iOS properly, you want to make sure that you don't implement new features without properly checking for the existence of classes, methods, and properties that were introduced in the newer versions of the OS. Unlike Android, you don't have to worry about a million hardware configurations. ;-)

    3. Weak Linking: To support a new feature and still be compatible with older versions of iOS, you need to weak link against frameworks that you are using to implement new features. You can read more about that in the Apple Documentation on Weak Linking.

    4. Deployment Target: The setting that prevents the app from loading on older devices is called the "Deployment Target". If you set this to 3.1.3, then your app will run on iOS 3.1.3 and higher. Remember that if you don't code the the proper version checking, your app may break.

    5. ARC: You can choose to enable or disable Automatic Reference Counting when you create the project. ARC scans your program at compile time only, not at runtime, it doesn't break the app on older versions of the OS.