Is it worth supporting iOS 3.x still?

[sleaver]

Question is in the title really! I'm currently making changes to my app to make the UI look more professional and one of the things I would like to use needs iOS 4.x. However my app currently supports iOS 3.2 upwards so I'm just wondering if others still support 3.x or is it safe enough to move to 4.x upwards?

[mer10]

Originally Posted by sleaver

Question is in the title really! I'm currently making changes to my app to make the UI look more professional and one of the things I would like to use needs iOS 4.x. However my app currently supports iOS 3.2 upwards so I'm just wondering if others still support 3.x or is it safe enough to move to 4.x upwards?

Nope

[Duncan C]

Originally Posted by sleaver

Question is in the title really! I'm currently making changes to my app to make the UI look more professional and one of the things I would like to use needs iOS 4.x. However my app currently supports iOS 3.2 upwards so I'm just wondering if others still support 3.x or is it safe enough to move to 4.x upwards?

We've decided as a company to make the move to iOS 5.

We did that for a couple of reasons.

The first is performance.

That means we don't support the iPhone 3G, or the 2nd generation iPod touch. Those devices have much weaker graphics hardware, less memory, and slower processors. If you do anything with animation or large data sets, you will need to test the hell out of those older devices.

The second is features. iOS 5 was a large leap forward in terms of OS features. The parent/child container view feature, ARC, storyboards, etc, etc.

As far as supporting iOS 4, supporting iOS 4 gives you those older devices, but niceties like blocks, game center, and lots of other goodies.

I would not hesitate to drop support for iOS 3.x. Think about dropping 4.x also.

[Touchmint]

Agreed ^^ somewhere on the business forums there are stats for this dont quote me but its something like < 5% use ios 3.x there were also ios 4.x numbers in there but i dont remember maybe like 11% idk.

[bobeast]

Originally Posted by Touchmint

Agreed ^^ somewhere on the business forums there are stats for this dont quote me but its something like < 5% use ios 3.x there were also ios 4.x numbers in there but i dont remember maybe like 11% idk.

So when you DO drop support for 3.x, do those customers running on 3.x just stop getting update notices? Whats to stop them from updating anyways? Does anyone know how that works?

[headkaze]

Some interesting stats here

You only need to target for armv7 to rule out the under performing devices. Another advantage of only supporting armv7 is you will effectively halve the size of your binary, have 2k texture sizes, a minimum of 256 MB of RAM and OpenGL ES 2.0 support.

[dljeffery]

I could be totally mis-remembering, but 3.2 was iPad-only, right? And the earliest post-3.2 iPhone/iPod touch release was 4.0?

First-gen iPads run 4.x perfectly well. Not to mention 5.0, which I think they run even better (at least, mine seems to). So I wouldn't see any reason to keep your base at 3.2, which already excludes people who wouldn't have upgraded their iPhones/iPod touches to 4.0 or later.

[nobre84]

any ipad user that didnt do the major (free) upgrade to 4.2 (first version of 4.x for ipads, including multitasking and many other stuff) , probably isnt updating any apps either.
Go ahead and require 4.0+

[RLScott]

Originally Posted by nobre84

any ipad user that didnt do the major (free) upgrade to 4.2 (first version of 4.x for ipads, including multitasking and many other stuff) , probably isnt updating any apps either.
Go ahead and require 4.0+

But you can't require 4.0+ for an update to an app that currently requires only 3.0, right?

[nobre84]

What you cannot change is UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities. Firmware version is fine

[mer10]

Originally Posted by nobre84

What you cannot change is UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities. Firmware version is fine

Wait, seriously??? So if I launch an app from day one that requires a gyro, I can't remove that requirement for in a future update??