Written by Federico Zanetello

Description: iOS and iPadOS provide powerful capabilities to help developers deliver breakthrough apps and games across all device generations. In certain instances, however, demanding apps with exceptional performance requirements may only be able to provide the best experience on devices with an A12 Bionic chip or higher. With Xcode 12, developers can now enable a setting for performance-intensive apps and games to indicate this requirement. We’ll walk you through the narrow circumstances for when to apply this setting and the app distribution trade-offs that must be carefully considered. Before selecting this approach, you should have deep experience in optimizing your apps. Watch “Delivering Optimized Metal Apps and Games” for specific insights into the tools and best practices you can use to make your product work well on all supported devices. For more on creating graphics-intensive experiences for your app or game using Metal, check out “Harness Apple GPUs with Metal”.

Required device capabilities

• If your app requires a specific hardware capability (e.g. ARKit) then you should declare so via the UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities property list key.
• This prevent users from downloading apps that their device doesn't support.
• You’re allowed only to maintain or relax capability requirements. Submitting an update with added requirements is not allowed.
• For a complete list of capabilities and devices compatability, see here.

iphone-ipad-minimum-performance-a12

• For intensive apps there's a new iphone-ipad-minimum-performance-a12 capability key that will allow apps to be downloaded only in devices with A12 or later hardware.
• This key has been created to support intensive and desktop-quality apps.