Is it safe to make iOS 4.3 as a deployment target for an application?

Question

Does anyone have updated statistics on the percentage of users using iOS 4.3? I am trying to determine if it will be safe to install iOS 4.3 as my deployment target, as there is a bug that has not been fixed before 4.3

Thanks.

Answer 1

What percentage of the iOS application client base do you want to configure (or opt out)? How long will your application last in the market?

Some older statistics from Bump show that more than half of the iOS application client base uses an OS update within 2 months from the release date, increasing by more than 90% (using this update or newer) after about 6-9 months.

Answer 2

Here are the statistics on September 8, 2012 from David Smith ’s blog for his application for audio books that receive weekly downloads of 100,000 pages:

5.1.x → 87.8%
5.0.x → 3.3%
4.3.x → 5.2%
4.2.x → 2.9%
4.1.x → 0.7%
4.0.x → 0.2%

This excludes 3.8 OSs, which, in my opinion, make up less than 1% of the total number of users today.

This means that you will lose ~ 4% of iOS users by creating an application using the iOS 6 GM Seed SDK (which limits your goal to iOS 4.3 and above).

Answer 3

Take a look at this forum post:

http://me.lt/650xH

Publishing people is pretty “heavy hitters" - Bump and Kayak - so I'm sure they have a lot of usage data. However, this is an older post (my mine, how fast they move in the iOS world).

Their answer is that basically 92% are on 4.x and it breaks away from there.

Answer 4

I do not have specific statistics, but from past experience you always have a good% of users who do not update their phones. Perhaps there is a chance that you can target 4.0 and put conditional code around your code? What is the error that was not fixed before 4.3?