As a new survey from app analytics firm Sensor Tower came out, it appears that Apple's upcoming major update to iOS could result in the destruction of more than 187,000 applications. This is due to the fact that Tim Cook & Co. will most likely eliminates 32-bit support when iOS 11 premieres this September.
Sensor Tower says that these figures represent about 8 percent of all the titles that are currently on the App store, and this lead to a warning that appeared in the first beta version of iOS 10.3 which states that 32-bit applications "will not function with new versions of iOS in the future", reported by Phone Arena.
64-bit processors were first introduced by Cupertino with the iPhone 5s, but the company only started demanding 64-bit support from developers in June of 2015. Thus, the actual number of apps made obsolete might be much higher than the analytics firm estimates, as Sensor Tower only included titles which were submitted prior to September 2013 and have not been updated ever since.
While "app rot" as it's known in developer circles is a real problem, it was hard to quantify just how many apps could be impacted by such a change. However, thanks to new data from Sensor Tower, we can put a rough estimate on this figure.
As of now, at least 8 percent of all apps in the App Store could be rendered outmoded overnight if Apple chooses to take away support for 32-bit apps. That adds up to approximately 187,000 apps, according to the firm.
This, by the way, is somewhat of a conservative estimate. Sensor Tower found out the number by looking for apps that were submitted right before the launch of the iPhone 5S in 2013 (when Apple first started supporting 64-bit) that haven't been updated since.
