Codebook and iOS 13, Dark Mode, and older iOS Compatibility
An overview of our plans for iOS support in Codebook.
iOS 13 was released last month (on Sept 19th), the latest major revision of Apple’s operating system for iPhones and iPads, so now is a good time to go over our plans for iOS support in Codebook.
Current support for iOS 13
The version of Codebook in the App Store now, 3.6.7, works with iOS 13, so if you upgrade you can still open and use Codebook as usual. The primary known issue at this point appears to be an iOS bug that is affecting many applications, where the TouchID prompt doesn’t show for authentication. The good news is this is easy to work around; place your finger on the Home button and it should work as before. You can also cause the prompt to display by rotating your device or tapping on the password field.
Note: always use the Sync feature to ensure you have a backup of your passwords and other sensitive data before you upgrade to a major new version of iOS (or upgrade your device for a new iPhone or iPad)!
iOS 13 Compatibility in 4.0.0
The first version of Codebook intended to fully support iOS 13 will be 4.0.0. We are currently beta testing this version and look forward to releasing it to the App Store soon.
Dark Mode (Coming in 4.1.0)
Codebook for iOS 4.0.0 won’t have iOS 13’s Dark Mode support. This is because of two factors:
- Adopting Dark Mode effectively means ending support for folks using an OS older than iOS 11 (currently Codebook supports iOS 9-13).
- Codebook 4.0.0 is a big compatibility upgrade, that is not backwards compatible with older versions of Codebook, and cannot sync with older versions of Codebook.
What those two things add up to is that we want to make sure that ALL of our current customers can upgrade to Codebook 4 before we end support for any older versions of iOS. Thus, we’re holding off on introducing Dark Mode until everyone on devices we currently support has had a chance to upgrade to Codebook 4.0.0.
This approach will allow us to introduce Dark Mode support soon enough (in fact we’re working on it now), alongside Dark Mode in Codebook for Android, in version 4.1. At that point we will end support for iOS 9 and 10, as well as iOS 11. Customers using Codebook 4.0 on any older devices who cannot upgrade yet will still be able to sync with Codebook 4.1 on newer devices.
We’re sorry to end support for versions of iOS older than 12, but very few customers appear to be using these older versions of the OS, and continued compatibility will seriously hamper our ability to maintain and improve Codebook going forward. We believe this approach (maintaining major version sync compatibility) strikes the right balance, making sure we don’t leave anybody too far behind.
Updated Icons for Dark Mode
You might have seen them already in Codebook for macOS on Mojave: we now have Dark Mode versions of all of Codebook’s database icons! We had the entire set touched up by IconFactory to make sure they look just fantastic in Dark Mode, we really hope you like them.
Here’s a sneak peak of Codebook’s upcoming Dark Mode support for iOS:
Sync Before Upgrading: A Reiteration
Before upgrading to a major update of iOS, and before upgrading to a new iPhone or iPad, we strongly encourage you to use Codebook’s Sync feature to ensure you have a backup of your data in case something goes wrong during the upgrade.
Sometimes major upgrades of iOS can cause apps to be deleted from your device to make space available for the upgrade, depending on your Settings (see Settings app > “iTunes & App Store” > “Offload Unused Apps”). It’s possible to lose all your Codebook data if this happens and you don’t have a backup you can restore from.
If you use Codebook on iOS we recommend you use Codebook’s Sync feature to ensure you have a backup of all your Codebook data before updating to iOS 13.