Dropping Support for iOS 8

[hramos]

iOS 8 was released almost 4 years back, an eternity for iOS releases. Thanks in part to the fact that any device that can run iOS 8, can also run iOS 9, it's used by less than 0.5% of devices. Anyone who wants to, can upgrade to iOS 9.

With these facts in mind, we will be dropping official support for iOS 8 starting next week. The core React Native team will no longer run tests on iOS 8 devices and will not maintain any workarounds that may be in place to support iOS 8. Dropping support for iOS 8 will also help React Native achieve consistency with the rest of the codebase at Facebook.

Workarounds

Developers who support iOS 8 in their apps may continue doing so as this is a Xcode-level setting (IPHONEOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET). Please be aware that any issues you may encounter when your app is running on iOS 8 devices will not be considered a priority.

[newyankeecodeshop]

Will you also be able to upgrade the JavaScriptCore shipped with Android to a version aligned with the iOS 9 version of JavaScriptCore? That would allow some of the older polyfills (e.g Map,Set, Object.assign) to be removed, and keep some consistency in the JavaScript runtime between iOS and Android.

[fkgozali]

f50df4f updated target deployment for RNTester/React xcode project to 9.0, and also removed RCTFont specific overrides for iOS <8.2.

[ikesyo]

@fkgozali You should also update React.podspec’s ios => "8.0" to 9.0.

[fkgozali]

@ikesyo good catch - I thought I did, will fix soon

[fkgozali]

092103e updates a few .podspec files to iOS 9.0

[hramos]

Support for iOS 8 has been dropped. Thanks @fkgozali for working on this. There's a few deprecated methods that are yet to be removed but it's been worked on. This issue can now be closed.