iOS 18 is back
The question I get the most is about compatibility. Wallflower is perfect for that old iPad that isn’t updated anymore and would otherwise spend its time in the drawer. After all, the project started with those devices in mind, back in 2019, and it supported iOS 9, the first iOS version with HomeKit, up until Wallflower 2 was released in 2024.
Today’s release of Wallflower 3.1 is about compatibility: In addition supporting 9 additional languages, to the new iOS 27 and iOS 26, it re-adds iOS 18 support. That just wasn’t ready in time for the 3.0 release. This makes Wallflower 3 compatible with devices that were sold as far back as 2018.
“Hey, Wallflower 2 supported iOS 17. And what’s with iOS 9 to 16? That’s what Wallflower 1 supported.”
I hear you, and for those releases, you still can get the old versions, and they still run.
But for the new release, I drew the line at iOS 18 for mainly two reasons: First, I wanted to support more devices by building a more flexible interface that suits iPads and iPhones in their various sizes, and second, I wanted reliability and rock-solid support where the users actually are.
Previous versions supported iPads in landscape and had a much harder time adapting to iPads in portrait mode and iPhones. Supporting multitasking or new sizes like the just-announced iPhone Duo wouldn’t be achievable with the way Wallflower 2 was set up either. To make the new version easily adaptable to a lot more devices and add freely customizable dashboards, it had to rely on features that were only introduced in iOS 18, and are not possible to port back to older versions without major drawbacks. One example of these is SwiftUIs Container Views that let the app dynamically change what’s on screen between the time it’s specified and the time it’s drawn.
Second, with iOS 18 it’s much easier to build future-proof support of new device types, Matter, and other HomeKit advancements. At the same time, there simply weren’t many iOS 17 users left in Wallflower 2. My theory is that Apple cut out the “New Home Architecture” in iOS 26, which left users below iOS 16.4 without access to an upgraded HomeKit Home— and that brought many users to upgrade to newer devices— even the ones not affected. And with Matter that’s going to be even more; using that platform simply isn’t fun on very old operating systems.
In any case, one thing remains true for all past and present users that have a compatible HomeKit home: The old versions of Wallflower stay available, and the purchases remain valid throughout all versions of the app. The new version needs iOS 18. But the app is available for all versions down to iOS 9.