Hacker News Reader

Comment by zackmorris | Hacker News Reader

I still target 5.1 because it does 90% of what 7 does but still works on first gen iPads. Apple has a tendency to only implement software features on their newest OS instead of back porting to earlier versions, because it sells more devices. It's unleet for developers to encourage this.

I think a reasonable prime directive for API developers is that if hardware can do something then software shouldn't be prevented from running on it. Sure there are arguments for speed/responsiveness but most of these are straw men because the real bottlenecks are somewhere else (reading from flash memory, internet lag etc). The only real hardware constraints I hit daily are limitations in OpenGL or limited ram (which wouldn't be an issue if proper virtual memory had been in place from the beginning so we didn't have to use mmap).

This kind of software "truthiness" is taking us further and further from computer science.

View on HN

What percent of your user base is still using 5.1?

The truth is that the original iPad had very little RAM. I imagine there is a very good reason that iOS 6 (and up) didn't make it onto that device.

I wish other developers would adopt such a considerate attitude. Alas, my personal experience is that many simply abandon users who dare to have a device more than a couple of years old. My worst personal experience being an app that became obsolete, only to be replaced by an app that doesn't support my version of iOS.

Obsoleting an app is a problem, but -- at least in the PC space -- people who do not upgrade from e.g. XP to Win7 are unlikely to pay for new apps - so, if you care about getting paid, there's no point in supporting XP home users (enterprise is different, and I do not wish to go into that).

Does anyone here know if that's also true for iOS devices? I'm quite sure that the big app spenders would be the people who continuously upgrade. There might still be a significant population who does not upgrade to make financial sense for still targeting 5.1 with new apps. I don't know, but my guess would be "not so much".

Well, I can only speak for myself, but I definitely would keep buying apps if given the opportunity. There are plenty of apps I've wanted to purchase, but haven't been able to - whether there are enough like me that would make the extra market lucrative enough is another matter.

If I started developing tomorrow, and have no 5.1 device, how can I do QA? I have an iPhone 4 that was never upgraded, but I can either keep it as is or upgrade to 7

Apple is making it really hard to support a version that you didn't target from day 1. And it is hard to target older versions from day one

If you're serious enough to want to target 5.1, you'd get a device that supports it. They're pretty trivial to come by at bargain prices.

Of course that's true. If you are serious enough, you can develop for any device. The question is, does it make sense from any perspective?

Realistically speaking, it's going to cost me a $1,000-$10,000 more to develop for 5.1 rather than develop just for 7 (extra device, extra design, extra testing time, potentially extra development time). If you didn't originally develop for 5.1 and it doesn't cost you as much, you are not serious (or severely underestimate your costs).

I'm not developing apps for iOS, but I'm not sure if I started tomorrow, and released (say) in two months, that it would be financially justified to target 5.1

I still support iOS 5.1 for the same reason on my main app, but it's getting harder to do so. The status bar change with iOS 7 introduced a ton of conditional code for me because iOS 5 doesn't support autolayout and unfortunately that's the easiest way to deal with the topLayoutGuide.

I saw somewhere that Apple doesn't allow new apps to target less than iOS 7. Is that correct?

No, Apple requires apps to target at least iOS7, and as far back as is practical.

Depends what you mean by "target". You can specify the whatever minimum OS version you want for an app.

You have probably heard something like "[After Feb 1] new apps [...] must be built with the latest version of Xcode 5 and must be optimized for iOS 7."

That only means you must use the latest dev kit and satisfy some other requirements. It does not mean that you need to disable support for older OSes.

Ahh I see, thanks!

It is not trivial to support ios7 with the latest gui elements (ios7 sdk) and also support prior versions. Practically speaking you will need to support only ios7+ after feb1, which for me is a lot of development work which is not worth doing with the income my apps give. I am therefore no longer supporting my apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com