Wow - on- demand resources are a great addition. I read the docs, and it says they are enabled by default for apps targeting iOS9.
Is it possible to use on-demand resources for apps running on iOS7 and iOS 8?
Thanks!
on demand resources in iOS7?
... hum... Think about it. If it's new why would it works on old SDK?
On-demand resources are predicated on the App Store serving up the initial portion of the application binary and then expecting the application to request the rest manually when it's likely to need it. NSBundleResourceRequest, a key part of the API for managing on demand resources, is new for iOS 9.
Which means that applications running on earlier versions of iOS are going to need to given a compatibility behavior--everything gets downloaded--or they're just not going to work at all.
I think that's the question. Is there a compatibility behaviour, or does it not work at all. I guess the question is - if you add tagged assets in your asset catalogs for ODR, does Xcode 7 then complain if you set the deployment target < iOS 9?
It would be easy enough to write app code that doesn't bother requesting the resources, and pretends they don't exist, if the NSBundleResourceRequest class is not available. We already do that kind of thing all over the place when supporting multiple OS versions. I am contemplating doing this in one app with an optional feature that takes ~60 MB of space. It would be nice if I could just add support for iOS 9 and later using ODR and not worry about implementing some home grown download scheme (or making the bundle 60 MB bigger unnecessarily).
I'm wondering the same thing. What is the backward compatibility mechanism of this new feature. WWDC sessions should make it standard to discuss backward compatibilities. Let's be honest, its very rare that an app only supports the latest iOS version. It always has been atleast 2 versions back.
For this what I assume is that old versions would simply ignore the whole ODR and let the users download the full pack of the app from the store. If this is it then there will be not much issue for us to use ODR.
Unfortunately it appears that to use ODR your app has to have its deployment target set to iOS 9.
In Xcode, you can set the deployment target to an earlier version and things compile without problem. However when running from Xcode on an iOS 8 device, the ODR resources are missing. And when trying to upload to the App Store, iTunes Connect returns an error stating that the deployment target has to be iOS 9 when using ODR.
This is disappointing. It definitely seems feasilbe to support ODR on iOS 9 and yet provide backwards compatibility by including all ODR assets inside the app bundle when delivering to devices with older iOS versions.
This is the error message: