Apple's iOS 14 brings a host of exciting new features, from major changes to the iPhone home screen to new features in Maps and Messages. And today (September 16), the final version of the iOS update was released. Of course, this assumes that iOS 14 will work on your iPhone now.

There is some good news on that front. If you purchased a new iPhone within the past five years, the answer to the question, "Will iOS 14 work on my iPhone?" is almost certainly yes.

According to Apple, the following devices can run iOS 14.

The oldest devices on this list are the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, and the original iPhone SE. the iPhone 6s series was introduced in the fall of 2015, and the original SE debuted in early 2016. So if you have one of these phones, at least you know that the next iOS update will not force you to upgrade your hardware if you want to keep your phone's software up to date.

Another thought on iOS 14 compatibility: if your device is running iOS 13, you can upgrade to the new version in the fall.

Just because Apple says you can run iOS 14 on an older device, does that mean your experience will be equivalent? I've been running the developer beta of iOS 14 on my first-generation iPhone SE all summer and have seen no performance degradation at all. i don't know if it's because of iOS 14 or because i'm using a 4-year-old iPhone, but i've noticed that my battery life is getting worse. I did notice that the battery life was getting worse.

Nevertheless, in my experience, many of the new features introduced in iOS 14 benefit from the larger screens of more modern iPhones. For example, Picture-in-Picture works fine on my iPhone SE, but you can imagine how small the window really is on the SE's already compact 4-inch display. Similarly, moving widget apps around on the iPhone SE's small screen is a bit of a challenge.

Backward compatibility is a longstanding advantage Apple has over Android phones; devices running Google's mobile OS usually see two major software updates - sometimes less for budget devices. Apple's compatibility goes back many years, but older devices may experience reduced performance and battery life with each successive iOS update. Apple has been working to mitigate that with recent iOS updates, though there has been little mention of that focus since iOS 14 was previewed at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

If you want to upgrade to the new version of iOS on a compatible iPhone, here's how to download iOS 14.