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!
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.
ReplyDeleteTarget for 4.2.
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.
ReplyDeleteBut 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.
Here is some real data - for my apps approx 75% of users are on iOS5.
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