AIDA64 for iOS 5th Anniversary
Our second mobile app turns 5
Posted | July 1, 2020
We figured it was essential to have AIDA64 running mobile devices as well, and by this we developed an app for iOS too. We decided to have a fully native application with native UI on iOS despite the much different platform and look & feel compared to Android -- especially 5 years ago. We were curious how the app would perform on a closed platform with relatively small number of device types. Despite that, in the past half a decade we have achieved over 2.2 million downloads in the App Store.
The development was sometimes challenging compared to our previous experience on different platforms due to the strict policy about obtaining device specific information while still being able to meet the requirements to have the app published in the official App Store.
One of the many remarkable moments on this journey was about the battery data that we've managed to display on iOS devices. It was an undocumented yet working method to obtain the battery information from the device without breaking any rules. This feature was available on iOS 9 in 2016, and continued with limited data on iOS 10. It was only at the release of iOS 11 when Apple decided to block all access to battery readings. Even to this day we are still getting a lot of questions and complains about our decision on removing battery information from our app. Well, the answer is simple: if we wanted to keep AIDA64 in the App Store, we had to remove it completely. But, on the other hand we keep working on bringing other exciting features to AIDA64 for iOS, and will continue to do so as the Apple ecosystem evolves.