How Modern Must Your iPhone Be?

An iOS version number sounds abstract, but the iPhone it locks out is not. The median app on the store still supports an iOS old enough to run on an iPhone 6s, a phone from 2015 that's now roughly 11 years old. So the typical app isn't chasing the newest hardware at all; it runs fine on a handset most people would call ancient. 78.4% of apps still install on an iPhone 6s, while only 21.6% have raised their minimum requirement to an iPhone 8 or newer.

By far the most common iOS band is iOS 14–16, with only 12.6% of apps demanding iOS 17 or newer (an iPhone XR or later). Developers know that requiring the latest OS shrinks their audience, so most set their floor a few versions back, recent enough to use modern tools, old enough to still reach phones that are several years old.

45.3% of apps still install on iOS 13 or older. Some are old apps nobody bothered updating; others are lean utilities whose developers see no reason to abandon phones that still work fine. Either way, they explain why an aging iPhone rarely feels as dead as people assume: most of the store still opens on it.

Minimum-iOS floors don't spread evenly across the decimals. They pile up on a handful of round numbers. The single most common floor in the whole store is iOS 13.0, used by 123,719 apps (12.6% of them), followed by iOS 15.0 (114,368) and iOS 12.0 (87,620). Those three tidy ".0" releases alone add up to more apps than the entire long tail of point releases sitting beneath them.

Habit explains this better than engineering does. Hardly any developer sits down and works out the ideal floor for their app. Most just keep whatever "minimum deployment target" their tools defaulted to when the project was first created, and never touch it again. So the store's compatibility map is really a fossil record of whichever iOS happened to be current when each app was first built, and that's why so much of the store still reaches back to phones from years ago.

Not every category feels the same pressure to upgrade. Sort apps by how many demand iOS 17 or newer, and Developer Tools comes out on top, with 34.9% requiring a recent iPhone. Weather isn't far off at 25.6%, and Graphics & Design sits close by at 24.3%. Makes sense once you think about who's actually using these things. Developers and designers usually already own newer hardware, so the teams building these apps don't hesitate to chase the latest frameworks without worrying much about who they'll leave behind.

Games land on the opposite end entirely. Just 4.9% require iOS 17, and a striking 92.4% still work fine on an iPhone 6s. Studios care about reach more than almost anything else, and every old phone they keep supporting is one more player who can actually play. So your iPhone can be ancient by tech standards, and you'll still have plenty of games willing to run on it, long after the professional tools have moved on and left you behind.

The reassuring averages hide a catch. Narrow the sample to apps people actually use, meaning the 3,524 apps in our index with more than 100,000 ratings, and the floor jumps. 21.6% of those popular apps require iOS 17 or newer, against 12.6% across the store as a whole, and only 62.7% still install on an iPhone 6s, versus 78.4% overall. The apps everyone downloads simply ask more of your hardware than the typical listing does.

That gap explains something you've probably felt yourself: your old iPhone can still run most of the store, but the specific apps you open every day, the big social, streaming, and finance names, are exactly the ones most likely to have left it behind. Count every app in the store and compatibility looks generous. Count only the apps you actually use, and things tighten up by a few years.

Two honest caveats are worth spelling out. First, "installs" isn't the same thing as "runs well." An app can list a low iOS floor and still lean on features or performance an old iPhone 6s simply can't handle gracefully, so a green light here just means the app will install, not that using it will feel good. Second, this only reads each app's declared minimum. There's no way to know whether that floor was a deliberate choice or just an untouched default left over from whenever the app was originally built, and it says nothing about future updates that might push the bar higher down the line. Every figure here comes straight from Apple's stated requirement across 981,372 apps, translated into the iPhones it implies. None of it is a benchmark we ran ourselves.