Apple releases a new version of iOS every year and has been applauded for making the upgrade free for iOS devices. It has now confirmed which iOS smartphones and tablets will receive iOS 8.
At Apple's annual WWDC, the company showed off new versions of its Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite to power its computers, and iOS 8, which will drive the company's smartphones and tablets. Every new version of iOS comes packed with features for current iOS devices, but that also means that there are going to be older devices that won't be able to update to the latest and greatest version of Apple's mobile OS.
While demonstrating iOS 8 to attendees at WWDC 2014, Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering revealed that the iPhone 4, which was released in 2010, would not make the cut. This was expected since Apple has historically ended OS updates for earlier models after three major OS updates, the iPhone 3GS was excluded from receiving an iOS 7 upgrade last year and remains on iOS 6.1.6. Apple has confirmed that the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s will all receive a free update to iOS 8 when it's released in the fall.
Apple's 5th generation iPod touch will be the only model in the iPod touch family to receive iOS 8. When it comes to Apple's iPad tablet lineup, the company will release iOS 8 for the iPad 2, iPad with Retina display, iPad mini, iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display.
iOS 8 includes several new features that iOS users have been asking for years. While iOS users have watched Android users have the option of choosing third party keyboards like Swype, SwiftKey and Minuum, Apple has finally added support for third party keyboards. Swype and SwiftKey, two of Android's most popular third party keyboards have already confirmed they are working on iOS 8 versions of their keyboards.
A major new feature in iOS 8 is the new Health app, which takes all of the data from user's various health and fitness apps and present all of the information in a centralized location, and its Dashboard view that lets users view their most current information in easy and intuitive graphs.
To check out the features above, along with all of iOS 8's new features, Apple has listed all of iOS 8's major features on its iOS 8 Preview site.
