Hi Will,
Thank you for your post and recommendations. We greatly appreciate your feedback and want to make sure we support you and your use of ArcGIS Field Apps moving forward. We have not set any official dates for the retirement of Explorer, Collector and Tracker at this time and retirement does not mean that we will remove apps from their respective stores either. We will leave the apps in the store with their current listings beyond retirement. We left the ArcGIS app (Esri's first iOS and Android app in the stores for 3 years after it was retired and only pulled the listings when it could no longer be installed on devices and was to be removed by Apple themselves).
We are seeking customer feedback and considering retirement time frames at this time. Please note the FAQ section of the Introducing ArcGIS Field Maps for the latest comments on this. We have recently updated both Collector and Explorer with critical bug fixes and will continue to do so throughout the time span that they are supported. All new development is focused on ArcGIS Field Maps and our consolidation efforts.
With required OS version support, there are a number of key considerations that we considered when making the decisions for ArcGIS Field Maps:
- Adoption number for existing apps - over 83% of devices are using iOS 13 or higher with Collector, Explorer and Tracker and 81% are Android 8 or higher. With iOS 14 we are already seeing rapid adoption in store analytics.
- Devices supported with a specific version requirement - iOS 13 supports devices back to iPhone 6s (released in September 2015).
- Technology advancements with OS versions - there were significant security improvements with iOS 13 that were a contributing factor. We have a number of customers that VPN devices inside of their network and IT departments are requesting our app source code be scanned. Dated components can be flagged as high or critical vulnerabilities. This is an important factor for all of us.
We will require iOS 13 and Android 8 (API 26) when we release our first version of ArcGIS Field Maps at the end of October. We are considering dates for retirement of the apps at this time (no decisions have been made yet) and retirement does not mean removal from the Apple App Store or Google Play - we will extend the time these apps are available in the stores beyond their retirement.
I do encourage others to provide their feedback on timelines and needs like you have Will. We do not want to disrupt field seasons, planned project deployments, and device procurement cycles as best we can and we want to give you plenty of time to migrate to new systems (both hardware and software) and we can't do that without your feedback. Thank you!