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Comment by mildtrepidation | Hacker News Reader

I'm also interested in the answer to this. Building for Android allows you to target a wide range of versions even if your build target is the latest; is there any analogue to this in the iOS world?

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You can build for ios 7 at the same time as ios 6. They tend to assume you'll only want to target the latest, but it can be done without much trouble, esp. if you already have a tested older project and are willing to put more time in to testing. I'm supporting an app which supports ios 5-7 at present but we tend to test only on 6-7, and have changed some of the UI to match better with ios7.

The issues tend to be with matching chrome if you have custom controls, but if you don't have many custom controls, you'd probably be fine. I imagine it's not very different from the story for Android.

You can do it in iOS world too. But the iOS7 is little different. I recently updated my app with iOS7 support. Many places in the code I had to write something like

if(version >= 7) {

  // some code which only works on iOS7
  // or some workaround for iOS7

} else {

  // code which works in older version

}

Previously I never had to write such code to support iOS6 and iOS5 together.

But the situation is much better than Android world. I also have the Android version of the same app (http://www.avabodh.com/lekh)and I have to write lot of version specific if-else in the code.

You can use:

if ([object respondsToSelector:@selector(selectorYoureCalling:)]) { //it Does! }

To check if the iOS version your app is installed on has the method and then use it if it does. It's pretty easy to keep things backwards compatible as long as you add fallbacks for functionality that's not present it older versions.

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