I love my Tablo “legacy” device that acquires and streams live TV broadcasts and functions as a DVR to record them. Tablo announced that its legacy apps for iOS and tvOS will no longer be supported after Sept 1, but the already-installed apps on iPhones, iPads and Apple TVs will continue to function.
Is there a way to preserve an installable copy of these apps for installation on future iPads or Apple TVs? These legacy apps will no longer be availalble in the App Store.
I fully realize the these legacy apps will no longer be updated. But perhaps the existing versions may function for a long while, and I would like the capability to install them on new devices that I might buy.
I’m aware there are new Tablo devices and that Tablo provides instructions to update the Legacy Tablo devices to new firmware. But I would like the added insurance of backup of legacy apps to install, if this is possible.
This is a Tablo Device and its app displayed on a TV through an Apple TV device:
Apps that you’ve previously purchased/installed are usually available to install in the future, assuming they work. Look in your purchase history in the App Store.
If that method doesn’t work, I can’t imagine there’s a way to do it. Since apps have to come through the App Store, you’d have no way to restore your backup, even if you could make one.
It would be hard for them to do this AND honor the promise that old apps would continue to work. If they don’t fork the new version of the app, the old app would just update to the new version automatically when it was released. So there’s no reason for them to break the existing app, unless they’re just being vindictive.
What I’m guessing they’re doing is releasing a NEW app, and just removing the old app from sale. In that case, you’d be able to download the last released version of that old app from your App Store’s previous purchase screen, but if you want to use any new devices/features/whatever you’d need to download the new app. This is a pretty standard practice.
Either way, you’re going to be reliant on Apple and Tablo behaving themselves in order to install the legacy version of the app going forward.
Then you can sideload that with an old version of Apple Configurator (ask if you can’t find it) onto any device compatible with the app as of today, as long as it is logged in with the same Apple ID you used to download the app. No jailbreak required.
