Fortnite Doesn’t Run on the iPhone 5s?

Diary of an Indie Game Developer: Chapter 22

Hmmm… That’s VERY interesting.

As you may recall, I’m only targeting high end mobile phones for my game. The hard part about that, as far as iOS is concerned, is that Apple doesn’t make it easy to prevent people with old iPhones from downloading your game.

Your only two options are to specify a minimum version of iOS and/or to specify which graphics API your game requires. By requiring iOS 11 and Apple’s Metal graphics API then, you can prevent anyone with an iPhone older than the 5s from downloading your game.

Epic clearly didn’t want to have to support the 5s, though. I don’t want to have to support the 5s either. That’s why the screenshot above is soooooooooooooo interesting! As a test, I tried to download Fortnite on an iPhone 5s. Sure enough, it downloaded just fine, but when I fired it up, I got the error message seen in the screenshot. When I tapped “OK”, Fornite quit.

Problem solved! Just have the game check the model number of the iPhone at launch and throw up an error if it’s not a model you want to support.

It never occurred to me that Apple would let you do something like that, but if Epic can do it, so can I. Dropping support for the 5s AND the iPhone 6 would make a HUGE difference in terms of how far I can take the my game graphically.

Epic has set the iPhone SE and the 6s as their minimum target. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. The SE and the 6s have pretty much identical tech specs: They both have an Apple A9 processor running at 1.8 GHz, and they both have 2 GB of RAM. That’s twice as much RAM as the iPhone 5s! The 5s also has an Apple A7 processor. The A7 scores 2144 on Geekbench 4 (multicore) whereas the A9 scores 4223!

Going with the iPhone SE and the 6s as the minimum, gives me double the RAM and roughly double the performance of the the 5s. I can’t prevent someone with a 5s from downloading my game, but as Epic has shown, I can throw up an error message if they try to play my game.

It’s not ideal. It would be MUCH better if Apple would let you specify which iPhones your game will run on, but they don’t, so an error message will have to do, and my game will look a LOT better, as a result.