Niantic announced today that they will be discontinuing support for several Apple devices that cannot be update to iOS 11. The support will be discontinued in an upcoming Pokémon GO update and will become effective on 02/28/2018.
You will not be able to play Pokémon GO on the following devices:
- iPhone 5 and iPhone 5C (2012-2013)
- iPad and iPad mini (2012)
- iPad 2
The official press release states that this change is a “result of improvements to Pokémon GO that push the application beyond the capabilities of the operating systems on such devices.”
It’s not clear what are the “improvements” that Niantic references, however, it’s not uncommon for developers to deprecate older devices in favor of new APIs and features.
iOS 8 support has been discontinued earlier
Niantic has already deprecated iOS 8 as a supported platform earlier last year.
As stated in the original post, Trainers using iOS 8 devices are not able to play Pokémon GO after 11/20/2017.
The recommended course of action for players using iOS is to upgrade to iOS 9 and above, otherwise they won’t be able to play the game. iOS 8 was initially released in 2014, with several new iOS releases after.
