Since I’ve been acquiring a few interesting devices lately (and I’ll be writing about them here in the next days, of course), I haven’t had the time to check on others as often as I usually do. The other day I checked the App Store app on both my third-generation iPad and iPhone 5 to see if there were updates available. There were indeed, and I’m glad that devices on iOS 9 and 10 are still getting a lot of them. On both devices, however, the updates for Flickr and AirPort Utility wouldn’t download or install. The process either got stuck or failed. On the iPad 3 with iOS 9.3.5 this is sadly all too common, but usually freeing up RAM or rebooting the device does the trick. Not this time. After several attempts, instead of getting stuck, the process started giving me feedback. This is what appeared on my iPhone 5 earlier:

Retrying led me nowhere. Meanwhile, on the iPad 3, I tried another workaround: I deleted AirPort Utility, went to the Purchased section in the App Store app, tapped the icon to reinstall AirPort Utility from the cloud, and the response was: This app is not compatible with this iPad. Then why the App Store app prompted me to update it? I tried with Flickr. Same response. Hmm.

Checking the App Store page for both apps it turns out that, while AirPort Utility shows iOS 9.0 and Flickr shows iOS 9.3 as minimum requirement, in both cases the iPad 3 and the iPhone 5 are absent from the (now extremely long and barely readable) list of supported devices. In short, both apps still support versions of iOS as old as iOS 9, but have dropped support for 32-bit devices.

And I can understand that. But how this situation is handled by the operating system is just poor. For starters, iOS should detect the incompatibility and stop signalling there’s an update available. Instead, you’re invited to download and install an update that won’t install, because it’s not compatible. Yesterday, when I tried re-downloading AirPort Utility from the Purchased section in the App Store and got the This app is not compatible with this iPad message, the system prevented me from even downloading the app. Today, as it should, it offers me to download the last compatible version of the app. And after downloading and installing the last compatible version… the App Store app once again updates the notification badge and tells me there are updates available for AirPort Utility and Flickr.

So, at the moment it appears I have two choices: either I remove those apps from my iPad 3 and iPhone 5, or I keep them on their last compatible version and keep seeing them pop up in the App Store update queue. But if I choose the latter, when there are other apps to update, and I tap Update All, the update process fails when it tries to update the un-updatable apps, and aborts; and I have to manually update the other apps that can be updated, one by one.

Is this an edge case? Probably. But it’s still a mediocre user experience. The user-facing dialogs are terse and generic. The app could not be downloaded at this time is utterly unhelpful and it’s like saying An error occurred — Why? What happened? What’s the source of the issue? Is the App Store server down? Is it a local issue that’s occurring on my specific device right now? Is it my internet connection?

This app is not compatible with this device. Fine. It wouldn’t hurt to add an additional note in the message saying something like The minimum hardware requirement for this app is an iPad Air (1st generation), or even better, This app no longer supports 32-bit devices. Wouldn’t this be a bit clearer? Instead you need to investigate and troubleshoot, and while it’s relatively easy for a tech-savvy person with a bit of time to find what’s wrong, a regular person who maybe is still using an older device will probably just delete the apps thinking they’ve stopped working altogether. Or they might ignore the updates, but then this could affect other ‘good updates’ in the App Store app update queue.

Situations like this require either a better communication via the OS interface, or the OS taking care of the matter invisibly, by stopping further update notifications when a device or iOS version are no longer supported by the latest app update.

(This post was written on a first-generation iPad using an app that no longer exists and on an iOS version (5.1.1) that, while simpler in features and UI, still feels more intuitive and robust than the current iOS.)