Rockstar Games has quietly published a support notice confirming that its mobile titles now require iOS 17 or later. Anyone running iOS 16 or below will no longer receive game updates, and the company says it will not be able to provide technical support for problems on those devices.
Don't worry. Your games do not stop working. Rockstar says you can still download and play its titles on older iOS versions. They're not deleting anything from your device or switching anything off. What ends is future updates and official help if something breaks, which isn't exactly new. Every developer eventually stops supporting old operating system versions, because maintaining separate builds for ageing.
The support article helpfully points people toward Apple's instructions for updating to iOS 17. Don't follow if your phone physically cannot run iOS 17.
Apple's cut-off for iOS 17 was the A12 Bionic chip, which meant the iPhone 8, the iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone X were all left behind. Those devices max out at iOS 16 permanently. There is no update to install, no setting to change, nothing a user can do.
Phones That Cannot Upgrade to iOS 17
| Device | Maximum iOS Version | Can It Follow the Advice |
|---|---|---|
iPhone 8 and 8 Plus | iOS 16 | No, hardware is not supported |
iPhone X | iOS 16 | No, hardware is not supported |
Anything older than iPhone 8 | iOS 15 or below | No, hardware is not supported |
iPhone XR, XS and XS Max | iOS 17 and beyond | Yes, update is possible |
iPhone SE second generation and later | iOS 17 and beyond | Yes, update is possible |
Devices that are permanently capped below iOS 17, meaning their owners cannot follow Rockstar's update advice.
Rockstar could technically keep maintaining builds for a five-generation-old operating system indefinitely, and the cost of that work would come out of the same budget as everything else it does. Nobody sensible wants a studio spending its engineering hours propping up hardware from 2017. This is a real trade-off. However, the mobile Grand Theft Auto games are paid products. People bought Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on their phones with actual money, and there is no version of that purchase where the buyer was told how long Rockstar would continue supporting these games.
This isn't a situation unique to Rockstar though. It's how the entire app economy works. You bought a product. The support window for it was decided later, by someone else, and communicated in a help article, which brings us to the argument that has dominated this year.
This is what the end of digital ownership actually looks like. The game still runs. It just stopped being maintained, and one day the operating system moves far enough that it stops running properly, and there is no disc in a drawer to fall back on because there was never a disc in the first place.
Mobile games are the purest digital-only products in existence. This is essentially a preview of where everything else is heading now that Sony Interactive Entertainment is ending disc production and Grand Theft Auto VI is shipping in a box with a code instead of a disc. Of course, a console game on a disc also stops working eventually, when the console dies and the hardware becomes hard to find. Physical media does not make a game immortal, it just puts the expiry date under your control rather than someone else's.
With that said, if this affects you, update your phone if it can run iOS 17. If your phone cannot, your games still work, so there is no emergency. What we would suggest is not deleting them to free up space, because while Rockstar says older downloads remain available, redownloading anything from an unsupported era is a process and let's just leave it at that.
In case you were still holding on to an iPhone 8 out of stubbornness, which is entirely respectable, this is one more small thing quietly pushing you along.
Of course, if you live in Norway, this might be the perfect time to upgrade to a new phone and maybe score yourself a free GTA 6 copy.