Hacker News Reader

Comment by cygwin98 | Hacker News Reader

The fragmentation issue in Mac OS X [1] is the hurdle that has been holding me off from writing apps for Macs. According to [1] (published about half a year ago), the Mac OS X market share breakdown:

26.8% Mountain Lion 10.8

28.0% Lion 10.7

35.1% Snow Leopard 10.6

10.0% Leopard 10.5 and Tiger 10.4

If we assume that half of the macs running Snow Leopard (10.6) are pre-2007 and ineligible for 10.9, we have about 72.3% macs that can upgrade to the free Mavericks, which is great news for Mac App developers.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/ad-network-os-x-is-becoming-fragmented-...

View on HN

Chances are that if someone is two point releases behind for their Mac OS X install then likely they're not a potential customer if what you're doing fills a niche.

>The fragmentation issue in Mac OS X [1] is the hurdle that has been holding me off from writing apps for Macs.

Doesn't seem to be doing much damage to Mac software houses/indies...

>According to [1] (published about half a year ago), the Mac OS X market share breakdown: Mountain Lion 10.8 26.8% Lion 10.7 28% Snow Leopard 10.6 35.1% Leopard and lower 10%

So just target Lion and above, that's 54%, which might sound small, but it's tens of millions of users. Mac software houses thrived in 2005 with 1/4 the user base that what that 54% represents.

That said, I highly doubt SL is 35% still.

So just target Lion and above, that's 54%, which might sound small, but it's tens of millions of users. Mac software houses thrived in 2005 with 1/4 the user base that what that 54% represents.

That's true. Though it's still way better to support 72% in one API than 54% in two slightly different APIs.

That said, I highly doubt SL is 35% still.

I think you're right. Those 32bit Intel iMacs are probably on their last legs at this moment. In one year, I predict Mavericks may have 80% or even higher market share, comparable to its remote cousin iOS7's share on iOS devices.

I just looked at the sales figures Apple reported. Apple has so far sold 95 million Macs that run the Mac App Store (Apple sells between 4 and 5 million Macs per quarter). The Mac App Store came preinstalled with Lion and was added to Snow Leopard in version 10.6.6.

If you are planning to offer your app on the Mac App Store, you don’t need to worry about compatibility with Leopard and Tiger, as those customers won’t see your app anyways. To me, that seems like a much better situation for developers than it is on the Windows side, where 40% of users still run XP.

Even for the same method each version of Mac OS X can behave slightly different, which causes pains for the users due to crashes and the developers to scratch their heads to reproduce. I've read quite a number of blog posts that the developers tried to reproduce a bug only happens to Snow Leopard. Extra code had to be written only for that. You can imagine how the code will smell if extra efforts need to be made for each version. That's the fragmentation issue I talked about and had concerns with.

Doesn't seem like Apple is really concerned with fragmentation, as they deliberately prevent their newer operating systems from installing on older hardware. They understandably would rather sell newer hardware. I'm pretty much stuck on Lion because Mountain Lion and above will not install on my hardware (which incidentally means I cannot develop for iOS7 since XCode5 requires ML+).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com