iOS 6 Support about asyncdisplaykit HOT 1 CLOSED

We actually added the dependency on TextKit shortly before launching the AsyncDisplayKit beta. Previously, a much less robust version of ASTextNode existed that did use CoreText directly, but there are a few features of TextKit that we needed for Paper and that enable improved future capabilities.

Even for Facebook, which of course appeals to many people and tends to have wide usage even on older iOS versions, less than 5% of users are on iOS 6. In fact there are so few that the Facebook for iOS app dropped iOS 6 support a couple months ago. I think by the time any app could be written with AsyncDisplayKit, there should be no compelling reason to support iOS 6—especially because the different UI design causes a lot of challenges in making your app look right / increases testing surface area a lot.

Curious to hear your points on why iOS 6 is valuable. You could definitely implement a very basic CoreText label node with very little code, but it's a lot more work to implement a powerful "rich text" view similar to ASTextNode. We don't plan to release the old CoreText version because it has many dependencies on other random Facebook stuff, and believe me, it's not beautiful code :)

from asyncdisplaykit.