Posts Tagged ‘iOS’

Installing Older Versions of Apps (e.g. NPR One) on Older Versions of iOS on a New Apple ID

Monday, December 7th, 2020

Hmm… quite a long gap between blog posts… again. It’s amazing how time flies.

Here is a quick workaround I figured out today on how to get an old version of an app installed on a new-to-you device that is running an older version of iOS than the minimum required by the current version of the app. (Run on sentence much?)

My specific situation: I just got an old iPhone 5S, it’s actually a hand-me-down-and-back. I wanted to run some streaming audio on it in the kitchen. Unfortunately, one app, NPR One, required a minimum iOS version of 13. The last major version of iOS for the iPhone 5S is version 12.

The Apple App Store will prompt you to install the last compatible version of an app (from App Store >> Account >> Purchases), but ONLY if you had installed it previously under your Apple ID.

I didn’t want my real Apple ID sitting around on a device with a “throwaway” PIN, so I had created a new Apple ID with a secondary (actually tertiary) email account I have. This brand new account did NOT have the NPR One “purchased”. So I was stuck. Or was I?

My workaround was to log into my primary Apple ID on the new-old phone, then go to the App Store and install NPR One from “Purchases”. The App Store happily prompted and allowed me to install whatever older version of NPR One is supported by iOS 12. This worked great.

Then I logged out of my primary Apple ID on the old phone, logged back in with the new disposable Apple ID, and I was happy to see that the application was still there!

I am crossing my fingers that this old version of NPR One will continue to stream for 2-3 years until I do another round of waterfalling device upgrades.

P.S. Weirdly, this ended up forking my Wallet. I had my Wallet items on my regular phone under my regular Apple ID, and a copy of Wallet (except credit card, I think), on my 5S phone under it’s new “not secure” Apple ID. I manually removed the Wallet items from the 5S. I guess this is a design feature, except, I didn’t want someone picking up this old phone from my kitchen and going wild spending my collected loyalty points!

sIFR (and Flash) is dead. Long live sIFR (and Flash)!

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

It’s hard to believe, but only a few years ago I eagerly looked for excuses to use Adobe Flash to make a website just a bit more interactive or fluid. Now, I have started the process of purging Flash from every site that we operate, and manage for clients. What changed?

iOS.

It’s truly astounding how much web browsing is done on iPhones and iPads where Flash does not exist (Flash is also on the outs in the Android world). One of our clients has the majority of their web traffic driven by their weekly email newsletter – and I’ve seen the numbers, a very large fraction of people read their email on their phones and tablets. Today, it is critical that your website does not depend on Flash. It’s also a good idea to slowly remove Flash from non-critical parts of your website too.

Which leads to today’s subject. On many of Perceptus’ websites we use sIFR, Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, which 5 or 8 years ago, was a great way to use nicer fonts on your website for headers. sIFR uses Flash. For some reason the most recent Google Chrome web browser broke some, but not all, of the sIFR headlines on print-bingo.com, our popular bingo card generator. It might be related to a missing  attribute or something relatively minor. But, rather than debug it, it was time to move to Javascript based fonts. On print-bingo.com, we’re now using Google Web Fonts.

Bye bye sIFR. You were a good thing for your day.