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Appocalypse Now - How iOS11 Will Kill Some Of Your Favourite iPhone Apps (independent.ie)
Ronan Price, writing for Independent: The app-ocalypse is coming and almost no one knows it. Apologies for the dreadful pun but, in about six to eight weeks' time, hundreds of thousands of older apps for iPhone and iPad will cease to work when Apple updates its iOS software to version 11. Businesses and consumers who rely on these elderly apps and update to iOS11 without knowing the consequences face a rude awakening. Their difficulty ranges from mere inconvenience that a useful app no longer functions to the complete loss of valuable data buried in a piece of obsolete software. Apple began signalling two years ago that it was signing the death warrant for older apps when it moved iOS to 64-bit software - essentially a more secure, faster and technologically advanced version that replaced the previous 32-bit code. First, Apple encouraged developers to rewrite their apps to 64-bit status but continued to allow 32-bit apps to function. Then it began to warn developers and customers that future iOS updates would experience compatibility issues. You may have seen -- and ignored -- the messages when launching apps in the last year telling you "App X needs up to be updated, the developer needs to update it to improve its compatibility." Finally, just this June, Apple confirmed that iOS11 would put the kibosh on 32-bit forever when it's released into the wild in late September. The announcement came and went with little fanfare from the public's perspective.
I never saw any of these warnings.
Then you haven't been paying attention.
It sucks that Apple make the late minute decision to just screw us and their users over like this.
By last minute do you mean since October 2014 when Apple said that after Feb 2015, all apps must support 64 bit. Also when Apple rejected 32 bit apps submitted after June 2015. And in Sept 2016 when Apple started removing apps that were not 64 bit. Now Apple never said for sure that iOS 11 would be 64 bit only but to say "it's a last minute decision" is disingenuous.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I am a paid Apple dev as well and guess what...they have been announcing this shit for years. Hell I knew about it before I even switched to iOS/macOS. You are either trolling or not paying attention, becase you have not been able to upload 32bit apps to the appstore for 2 years.
P.S. Captcha: delirium
Unless you're doing things that benefit from having a 64 bit word size
One benefit is immunity to return-oriented programming (ROP) and other exploits of vulnerabilities caused by inadvertent programming defects. Address space layout randomization (ASLR), a common mitigation against ROP, is more effective with 64-bit pointers than with 32-bit pointers.