Which version of iOS should I configure for 2012?

Question

Hi, I’ve just started working on an iPhone application that I plan to ship to the App Store last week of August. I'm using iOS 4.1 right now, but I'm thinking of using iOS 5 as it supports JSON, what should I do? Use iOS 5 or 4, my application is basically a graphic game.

Answer 1

at the beginning of the year, when I made this decision, I used data on macrumors.com from March to help me determine where my users might appear.

the graph on this link shows a fairly steady and very slowly decreasing share of iOS 4. users. This is also 4 months.

they also acknowledge that if you sell apps, those who stick with iOS 4 are more likely to be the same as my parents who got an iPad and never updated or bought apps, or are too poor to allow themselves to switch to a more convenient one. a telephone, and perhaps it also pinches pennies.

in any case, a crude rule of thumb based on statistics on this site ... you are likely to give up somewhere between the 1 / 6th and 1 / 10th markets, and this share will be the most difficult part of the market to sell .

you need to decide how aggressive you should be, how much you’ll return to target iOS 4 users based on how much effort you will need to make to be backward compatible and worth it. for me, I created one new application that I was able to run on iOS 4.2, but it seemed to me that it would be too much, so I got stuck in iOS 5.

Answer 2

Most users now use iOS 5. Still, you decide to support iOS 4 (obviously this makes your application accessible to more people, you need to decide whether to lose iOS 5).

If JSON is the only deciding factor, there are many iOS 4 compatible JSON libraries such as SBJson .

Answer 3

If nothing is stopping you from installing iOS 4, go to it. You will have more potential customers than if you only focused on iOS 5.

Although most users have upgraded to iOS 5, there are still a decent number of people using iOS 4.

See these statistics for more information. The link says they are updated weekly.

Also, be sure to use the latest version of the SDK (or beta SDK if you want). You can target older versions of iOS with the latest SDK.

Answer 4

Always use the latest version of the SDK. If you have membership in the developer program, you can use the preliminary version, but this may be due to errors and other problems that you do not want to deal with in the delivery application. Therefore, my recommendation is to use the current version of Xcode from the app store, and perhaps use the preview version to familiarize yourself with the upcoming changes and features of iOS 6, but NOT for your main development efforts.

Answer 5

Edit: you confuse the xcode version with the ios versions. You should probably upgrade to the latest xcode. 4.3.2 Do I believe? But this is different from ios 4,5,6.

which of the targeting was in my original answer.

This is a kind of opinion question / how accessible you want your application to be. The lower versions of ios that you support, the more people will be able to access your application. If I said that although I do not have a recent breakdown of users across devices, even iphone 3G can get iOS 5, so you should be safe enough to use.

Answer 6

For new applications, I would use iOS 5, at least. However, if you mainly focus on iOS 4.1 development targeting, I'm not sure if it is worth the upgrade. Regardless of the version of iOS you are targeting, you should always use the latest version of Xcode, as this will give you better optimization, more accurate warnings, and a more efficient static analyzer.