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0 pointsStressedDev1y ago0 comments

Software engineers are notorious for not wanting to support legacy devices and software. You see this all of the time on Hacker News. If you want more venders to support older devices, you need to change the culture. You also need to acknowledge the costs. Here are the costs:

1.Increased software development costs - Costs increase because software has to be designed to fallback to alternative implementations when the newest OS, browser, database, etc. features are not available.

2. Increased performance optimization costs. Older devices tend to be slower and this means software engineers will have to spend more time optimizing programs.

3. Increased testing costs - You need to test all features on older and newer devices.

The other problem is it might not be worth it to support older devices. Basically, supporting older devices may not be profitable (i.e. too few users who do not generate enough revenue to justify the increased costs).

0 comments

hamdouni1y ago

There is a little difference between not supporting any more and blocking the user.

ryandrake1y ago

None of those points incentivise software developers to deliberately block me from using the “last working version”. That last version already exists: it was already tested, already performed well, and had all of its engineering costs already spent. Suddenly stopping me from using it does not impact their profit in the slightest.

I was an iOS developer in a past life. It doesn’t take that much effort to keep the lights on on the older OS. But even if it did, it makes zero sense to suddenly make that already working older version stop working.

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