Maintaining support for iOS 12 - 14 until January 2023

Announcements
1

Our policy has always been to support the “latest, stable releases of all major browsers and platforms”. However, given the large number of still-in-use Apple Devices which are limited to iOS 12, we have made a temporary exception:

We will aim to support Safari on iOS 12.5 and iOS 13 until January 2023. Discourse 3.0 will be the last stable version to ship with iOS 12 / 13 support. After Discourse 3.0 is released, iOS 12/13 support will be removed from tests-passed (the default version used by self-hosted sites and on our official discourse.org hosting).

After that, iOS 12 and 13 users will then be shown the non-interactive basic HTML view. All iOS browsers are based on Safari so this will affect all of them, including Chrome, Firefox and DiscourseHub.

For reference, a list of devices and their maximum iOS version can be found at iosref.com/ios. Official guidance from Apple can be found on these pages:

iPhone: iPhone models compatible with iOS 14.7 - Apple Support
iPad: iPad models compatible with iPadOS 14.7 - Apple Support

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2

Just to clarify if you use the discourse hub on IOS this change won’t affect you. Right?

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3

The DiscourseHub app (and all other browsers on iOS) use Safari under the covers. So this will also affect the DiscourseHub app on iOS 12.

I’ll update the announcement to make that clearer :eyes:

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4

Will the application be updated to require iOS 13 or later?

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The app’s supported iOS version is not directly related to Discourse’s supported iOS version. Technically, the app could be used to browse a super-old installation of Discourse. But that said, it’s safe to assume our app’s required iOS version will rise in the not-too-distant future :+1:

Note that from January 2023, we will go back to supporting only the latest iOS (currently iOS 15). We’re making a temporary exception for iOS 12 because some devices cannot be updated any higher (e.g. iPhone 5s/6).

We do not intend to do the same for iOS 13 / 14, because no devices are forced to be stuck on those versions.

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Will older versions of Safari on macOS also be affected? If so, will it only affect macOS Mojave (since that’s the version of macOS that was released alongside iOS 12)?

Okay, so you’ll be dropping support for Safari 13 and Safari 14 too?

By the way, thanks in advance! :thumbsup:

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Safari on macOS can be updated independently to the operating system. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_version_history:

Screenshot 2022-04-19 at 16.39.22
Screenshot 2022-04-19 at 16.39.221430×266 38.7 KB

Our policy is to only support the latest, stable versions of browsers. Therefore we only support Safari 15 on Desktop.

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Oh yeah, I completely forgot about that! Thanks for the reminder!

Okay, maybe the question I should be asking is: Will iOS 13 and iOS 14 also show the non-interactive basic HTML view?

Sorry for the confusion… :see_no_evil:

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Yes - any unsupported browser is given the basic HTML view. (We make sure that works even on mega-old browsers like Internet Explorer 6! :older_man:)

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Ah, now it’s beginning to make more sense. macOS Catalina is the oldest version of macOS to support Safari 15, so that answers my question. Again, thanks a bunch!

I’m off to test if it’ll work on Internet Explorer 1.0… :grin:

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And Netscape? :rofl:

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12

Haha! Maybe I should try that! :wink:

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OT, but it looks quite good as long as you use a proxy to connect to modern sites over HTTPS. :wink:

image
image1026×768 52.2 KB

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14

Doesn’t than mean that I should be able to view a basic non-interactive HTML view now instead of this screen? :

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Yes we should never be stuck on the loading spinner.

What exact model/browser/version are you using? Can you repro on meta? @david recently amended it so we run the code through a transpiler, maybe it regressed (or just got fixed)

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Yup, that issue was fixed over in

Once we officially drop iOS12 support, yes - you’ll be shown a basic HTML view :+1:

This particular case was a bug - as Sam said, we never want people to be stuck on the loading screen.

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Starting a couple of days ago, I have been stuck on the loading screen if I try to access the Sketchup forum on my iOS 12.5 device. Obviously, this is not happening with this forum. Is this something which can be fixed?

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I think it should be sorted the next time the site is updated. I’m afraid most of the Team are enjoying their weekend at the moment, so I don’t have a firm idea of when that’s next scheduled?

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Thanks. I also noticed that I can’t reply to messages on this forum from the iOS device. I can enter the reply, but when I hit the reply button nothing happens. I have to go to the forum on my pc and hit the reply button from there.

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@PdxRick it should be working better on the sketchup forum now.

Thanks for reporting the issue with replying - we’ll take a look.

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