Skip to main content

Developing a new app; is maintaining iOS 4 compatibility still worth it? [closed]

Image
By User



I am currently in the starting phase of developing a new iOS app (for both iPhone and iPad) for a client. I'm really indecisive if I should still support iOS 4 or not. I tried to find some statistics about the adoption of iOS 5, one of the only fairly recent articles that I could find was this one. This article shows that 59,16% of all users of Bump for iPhone were using iOS 5 or later as of December 30th of last year. The (free) app will not be out for another 1.5 to 2 months, my personal guess is that the iOS 5 adoption percentage will be pretty large by then.





I fully realize that there is no single answer to this question, but I would like to know what your experiences with backwards compatibility are and if you think it is worth the hassle. I would really like to use the new Storyboard functionality of Xcode and I would also really like to use ARC (although I understand that it is partially useable with iOS 4 too). The app will also use quite a bit of JSON and which is now natively supported in iOS 5 without the use of a third party framework.





Thanks for the help!


Labels:

Comments

  1. Tips For AllFebruary 9, 2012 at 1:25 AM

    The answer is yes. You have no idea how many ppl have no clue that 5.0 is out, or even what it is. My neighbor still has 3.1 and it is so old that iTunes fails to upgrade it.
    Target for 4.2.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Tips For AllFebruary 9, 2012 at 1:25 AM

    It honestly depends. If your app wants to reach a large number of users (social networking, maybe a game), then supporting older OS's is the ONLY way. Your statistics imply that a full 41% (most likely a lot less) of iOS devices are on iOS 5, so 41% of a huge install base may not seem like a lot, but when it comes to marketing, it's huge.

    But if you want to reach a special audience (say a special synthesizer app, or a REALLY complicated application), requiring the latest OS becomes less of a burden.

    So, take your pick. It's really your personal choice. Either way; you can't go wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tips For AllFebruary 9, 2012 at 1:25 AM

    Here is some real data - for my apps approx 75% of users are on iOS5.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why is this Javascript much *slower* than its jQuery equivalent?

By User
I have a HTML list of about 500 items and a "filter" box above it. I started by using jQuery to filter the list when I typed a letter (timing code added later): $('#filter').keyup( function() { var jqStart = (new Date).getTime(); var search = $(this).val().toLowerCase(); var $list = $('ul.ablist > li'); $list.each( function() { if ( $(this).text().toLowerCase().indexOf(search) === -1 ) $(this).hide(); else $(this).show(); } ); console.log('Time: ' + ((new Date).getTime() - jqStart)); } ); However, there was a couple of seconds delay after typing each letter (particularly the first letter). So I thought it may be slightly quicker if I used plain Javascript (I read recently that jQuery's each function is particularly slow). Here's my JS equivalent: document.getElementById('filter').addEventListener( 'keyup', function () { var jsStart = (new Date).getTime()...
3 comments
Read more

Is it possible to have IF statement in an Echo statement in PHP

By User
Thanks in advance. I did look at the other questions/answers that were similar and didn't find exactly what I was looking for. I'm trying to do this, am I on the right path? echo " <div id='tabs-".$match."'> <textarea id='".$match."' name='".$match."'>". if ($COLUMN_NAME === $match) { echo $FIELD_WITH_COLUMN_NAME; } else { } ."</textarea> <script type='text/javascript'> CKEDITOR.replace( '".$match."' ); </script> </div>"; I am getting the following error message in the browser: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_IF Please let me know if this is the right way to go about nesting an IF statement inside an echo. Thank you.
5 comments
Read more