There seems to be some concerns about the iPad requirements and how we may have handled letting you all know about the requirements.
Firstly, I’d like to apologize if any of your feel tricked, or in any way lead on about iPad 1-4 and Mini 1 support. It was not our intention to deceive you, or even to keep you in the dark about this.
We don’t like to burden the world with details of our development efforts when they are in flux. However, we did have a good idea early on about the iOS limitations. We knew that iPhone support was not coming, because the user interface required a large screen. We also had a good idea that the earlier generation iPads wouldn’t make the cut, and we even spoke freely about this on the community site. For example, 8 days after we launched, back on May 20th: Release date for iOS App? – @Rik made a very good prediction on supported iPads and I backed him on it as spot-on.
We worked on trying to get iPad 3/4 support all the way until the end. iPad 2 and below would be impossible due to such little RAM on those devices. In the end, the OpenGLES 3 limit became too great of a development effort to bypass, so we went with the next generation of devices. This was a tough decision, especially because own households have multiple iPads that were left unsupported. Yes, we could have worked through it, but we made a call that left those devices unsupported, so we could continue on Roon’s feature roadmap.
Unfortunately, all this means that our product will not work for some subset of the people out there. This is the reality of software development and all I can offer is that we will be here for you to re-trial once you do have compatible hardware.
Future Roon developments will continue to push technology forward as we add more features that stress the hardware to it’s limits. We hope to have to obsolete hardware support rarely, but I’m sure it’ll happen. When it does, we will allow a mechanism to not upgrade to the latest software or to run in a degraded mode.