iOS 8 Now Installed on Nearly 60 Percent of Active iOS Devices

[proline]

That's because Pages, Numbers & Keynote all support the new hand off feature in OSX10.10 & iOS8.

If you don't need to support a new feature of iOS8 then why limit your potential customer base to 55%?
You proclaim great knowledge of development but you don't demonstrate it in any of your posts here.

Not one person who is willing to say what they actually develop has weighed in on this, so you don't have much to go on at all. But doing a great app for 55% which will be 95% in a few months as people upgrade is a lot better than doing a mediocre app for 95% now that will still be a a mediocre app for 95% in six months. Getting recognition on the app store is essential if you want to make money, and mediocrity isn't the path to get it. You need to support the latest features that apply to your app.

I trust him better than someone who adds no value to forum discussions, no interesting insights, personal experiences, original thoughts or views. Ask yourself why every one of your posts is an attack on other people. That tells us a lot about you.

Dude, this is the MR forum- you need to expect a polemical style. Most of the posts here are total crap. If you want decorum and insight, go to Ars Technica or Stack Overflow which actually punishes people for worthless posts.

 

[TimelessOne]

You aren't much of a developer if you don't appreciate the benefits to devs of iOS 8- universal storyboards for iPhone / iPad, adaptable UIs, many new APIs including UIAlertController which is much better than the UIActionSheet and UIAlertView classes it replaces, etc. Sure, Apple did a good job making a lot of stuff deploy back to iOS 7, such as Swift (which I assume you aren't going to use for 3 years), but that doesn't mean there are no benefits to going iOS 8 only. Obviously everybody's case is different and some, such as yourself, will prefer to spend time testing on obsolete OSes instead of implementing the latest APIs. Suit yourself, the users will decide.

You are not much of a dev if you do not understand legacy support software. IOS 7 made devs life's hard spent over a month's worth of time dealing with getting our app to just work correctly with iOS 7. Now we are going to have to deal with a lot of time just to move to iOS 8 with a lot of undocumented changes. Most of it is found by dumb luck so yeah the release in March has us worried as we have to make the switch and standard hoping we find what stuff apple broke.

 

[Gutwrench]

You posted this yesterday and edited it tomorrow? Whoa!

 

[proline]

You are not much of a dev if you do not understand legacy support software. IOS 7 made devs life's hard spent over a month's worth of time dealing with getting our app to just work correctly with iOS 7. Now we are going to have to deal with a lot of time just to move to iOS 8 with a lot of undocumented changes. Most of it is found by dumb luck so yeah the release in March has us worried as we have to make the switch and standard hoping we find what stuff apple broke.

Don't worry. Apple doesn't expect you to do anything in March. There won't be any major changes to iOS (ie. split screen) until WWDC 2015 despite what rumor fools say. Apple knows upgrading to iOS 8 will keep your hands full. That said, they give you a full year and if you can't handle it within that time frame you aren't ready for the big leagues. Still being on iOS 7 is fine, but anyone still targeting iOS 6 at this point is incompetent.

 

[TimelessOne]

Don't worry. Apple doesn't expect you to do anything in March. There won't be any major changes to iOS (ie. split screen) until WWDC 2015 despite what rumor fools say. Apple knows upgrading to iOS 8 will keep your hands full. That said, they give you a full year and if you can't handle it within that time frame you aren't ready for the big leagues. Still being on iOS 7 is fine, but anyone still targeting iOS 6 at this point is incompetent.

No the issue is more that is when we will be required to compile on xcode 6 and it broke a lot of stuff and most of it undocumented.

It more the requirements that have to be added.
Plus unless it gives us something to make it worth the upgrade no point. We have to be concerned by the lowest 5% of our user base not the rest.

 

[Seoras]

Not one person who is willing to say what they actually develop has weighed in on this, so you don't have much to go on at all. But doing a great app for 55% which will be 95% in a few months as people upgrade is a lot better than doing a mediocre app for 95% now that will still be a a mediocre app for 95% in six months. Getting recognition on the app store is essential if you want to make money, and mediocrity isn't the path to get it. You need to support the latest features that apply to your app.

No one is going to own up to any published App with the level of hostility you've been showing contributors.
If I said what my Apps were I'd fully expect some 1 star reviews to pop up tomorrow on my radar and I'd have a pretty good idea of who and why.

I don't know what you've been smoking, dude, but you clearly aren't an App developer if you think limiting your labor to 55% of iOS users is sensible.

You've been telling folks on here they aren't any good as developers because they are supporting 2 iOS versions.
That actually takes more work, more development experience, skill and know how that supporting just 1.
"Doing a great app for 55%"....? Eh?
A great App requires a great idea and excellent execution. Not a whole new suite of new API's.
So unless your App is targeting new software or hardware features from September you don't need to limit your App to iOS8.

You just want to bully users, still on iOS7, into upgrading.
Just as you've been posting bullying comments on this forum.

Dude, this is the MR forum- you need to expect a polemical style. Most of the posts here are total crap. If you want decorum and insight, go to Ars Technica or Stack Overflow which actually punishes people for worthless posts.

Polemic isn't:

To my post:

You aren't much of a developer if you don't appreciate the benefits to devs of iOS 8...

or "nomore" 's post:

If that's your one beef with swift you don't know much about coding.

or "G4DP" 's post:

Yeah, we should trust the guy who can't spell 'know'.

or "CFreymarc" 's post:

Wow. I really hope you aren't a developer because you're pretty out of it...

Be a sweetie and be nice to the other folks on here.
Stick to the facts and stop beginning your statements with put downs.
Get someone to give you a hug too, I think you need one.

 

[ksuyen]

My iPad Air will remain on iOS 7.1.2 due to it being ridiculously smooth and fluid.

My Air is at 8.1 and it's ridiculously smooth and fluid. I am not sure what's the difference between my iPad and your iPad, but that certainly is not the iOS issue.

 

[Tech198]

i use this term loosley, but what do u think the number of 'active' devices really mean to users ....

Its not like after upgrading we have a choice to go back ....

So, u could also state these stats are false, since 35% of users may want to go back, but now can't... thus, better business for Apple

44% of users know that ...

 

[HarryWild]

I decided to upgrade but after all the bugs and fixes have been ironed out! I probably do the update in June 2015 or so! Usually, I don't use my iPad Mini Retina that much in the Summer months! I know it will slow it down about 15% but it has better features and I will locked it so no further updates or upgrades will happen in the life of this iPad.

People do know; but each upgrade just slow your mobile device by 10% or more!

 

[TimelessOne]

No one is going to own up to any published App with the level of hostility you've been showing contributors.
If I said what my Apps were I'd fully expect some 1 star reviews to pop up tomorrow on my radar and I'd have a pretty good idea of who and why.

I don't know what you've been smoking, dude, but you clearly aren't an App developer if you think limiting your labor to 55% of iOS users is sensible.

You've been telling folks on here they aren't any good as developers because they are supporting 2 iOS versions.
That actually takes more work, more development experience, skill and know how that supporting just 1.
"Doing a great app for 55%"....? Eh?
A great App requires a great idea and excellent execution. Not a whole new suite of new API's.
So unless your App is targeting new software or hardware features from September you don't need to limit your App to iOS8.

You just want to bully users, still on iOS7, into upgrading.
Just as you've been posting bullying comments on this forum.



Polemic isn't:

To my post:


or "nomore" 's post:


or "G4DP" 's post:


or "CFreymarc" 's post:


Be a sweetie and be nice to the other folks on here.
Stick to the facts and stop beginning your statements with put downs.
Get someone to give you a hug too, I think you need one.

I figured out a long time ago those bashing devs tend to not be devs themselves and have zero understanding of what it takes to be one much less a good one.

Take swift. Yeah it looks cool has some nice features but over all it is a meh to me. It really does not bring me anything extra. It is just one more thing to learn. I already know c# objective c, and Java. What does swift bring me that I do not already have. I could pick it up and be fairly good at it in a short time.

Draw back to swift. A lot less dev support out there for it. Stack over flow does have the amount of stuff built up yet like it does for everything else. Short of Apple requiring apps to be built in it. It just is not going to take off.

 

[proline]

We have to be concerned by the lowest 5% of our user base not the rest.

And this is where you are horribly mistaken. This attitude might be OK for an IT weenie at a big company that still deploys Windows XP, but iOS users are a different sort. While you are dealing with bugs affecting the bottom 5% someone else will come along and delight the other 95% with a faster, less buggy, more full featured app that they were able to develop faster than you by setting their target to iOS 8. Then you're done for. Now maybe you don't have any competition right now, so you can go into dinosaur mode, who knows...

 

[TimelessOne]

And this is where you are horribly mistaken. This attitude might be OK for an IT weenie at a big company that still deploys Windows XP, but iOS users are a different sort. While you are dealing with bugs affecting the bottom 5% someone else will come along and delight the other 95% with a faster, less buggy, more full featured app that they were able to develop faster than you by setting their target to iOS 8. Then you're done for. Now maybe you don't have any competition right now, so you can go into dinosaur mode, who knows...

And there you show us all. You are not a real dev or at the very least not a good one and sure as hell not professional.

 

[proline]

I figured out a long time ago those bashing devs tend to not be devs themselves and have zero understanding of what it takes to be one much less a good one.

Take swift. Yeah it looks cool has some nice features but over all it is a meh to me. It really does not bring me anything extra. It is just one more thing to learn. I already know c# objective c, and Java. What does swift bring me that I do not already have. I could pick it up and be fairly good at it in a short time.

Draw back to swift. A lot less dev support out there for it. Stack over flow does have the amount of stuff built up yet like it does for everything else. Short of Apple requiring apps to be built in it. It just is not going to take off.

You don't have to be a good dev to recognize one. Users know what they want- developers who are supporting the latest APIs. Your excuses rightfully fall on deaf ears. As for Swift, iOS 9 will be full of Swift only APIs. If you don't learn it now you will fall behind in June.

 

[TimelessOne]

You don't have to be a good dev to recognize one. Users know what they want- developers who are supporting the latest APIs. Your excuses rightfully fall on deaf ears. As for Swift, iOS 9 will be full of Swift only APIs. If you don't learn it now you will fall behind in June.

Yeah you are showing you bought the marking bs hook line and sinker.

 

[proline]

No one is going to own up to any published App with the level of hostility you've been showing contributors.
If I said what my Apps were I'd fully expect some 1 star reviews to pop up tomorrow on my radar and I'd have a pretty good idea of who and why.

Talk about creative excuses.

You've been telling folks on here they aren't any good as developers because they are supporting 2 iOS versions. That actually takes more work, more development experience, skill and know how that supporting just 1.

I guess you aren't able to listen. That's exactly what I've said. Supporting 2 OSes is a lot more work. And unfortunately, unless you have unlimited resources, that work comes at the expense on new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. You can easily tell the difference between an app that still runs on iOS 5 and an iOS 8 only app.

You just want to bully users, still on iOS7, into upgrading. Just as you've been posting bullying comments on this forum.

Bullying is, if you are willing to use a dictionary, "the use of coercive force or threats". Who exactly have a threatened? I've pointed out that some people who call themselves iOS devs know little about the art. That's just stating the facts.

 

[TimelessOne]

You don't have to be a good dev to recognize one. Users know what they want- developers who are supporting the latest APIs. Your excuses rightfully fall on deaf ears. As for Swift, iOS 9 will be full of Swift only APIs. If you don't learn it now you will fall behind in June.

No but it takes a lot more than buying marketing bs to know what one is.

You do not have any clue.
Like you think swift is that great. Hate to tell you this but it is not. It is a meh.

 

[proline]

No but it takes a lot more than buying marketing bs to know what one is.

You do not have any clue.
Like you think swift is that great. Hate to tell you this but it is not. It is a meh.

Where exactly did I say swift was great? Literacy is important here. I said being onboard with swift will be necessary for the APIs and developer tools that are released with iOS 9. That's a fact. Actually, it's already a requirement for certain iOS 8 tools such as playgrounds. By putting your feeling first you've ensured that you will be behind the pack later on. Then again, you haven't said anything that proves you even have an app in the app store.

 

[TimelessOne]

Where exactly did I say swift was great? Literacy is important here. I said being onboard with swift will be necessary for the APIs and developer tools that are released with iOS 9. That's a fact. Actually, it's already a requirement for certain iOS 8 tools such as playgrounds. By putting your feeling first you've ensured that you will be behind the pack later on. Then again, you haven't said anything that proves you even have an app in the app store.

Oh but I do but like others have said we are not going to tell you as I would expect a 1 star review in the morning . It is pretty clear you are insulting and do not understand what it takes to make a good app or be a developer. You see marketing and some how think it is fact.

Instead as multiple people pointed out that is not how it works.

If Apple forces us to go swift we will. It is not exactly hard to pick up and learn a new language. It would be few weeks to pick it up. The biggest lost would be the knowledge base on sites like stackoverflow. Swift is meh. It is another programming language so yeah it is meh. All it would be to me is another one to add to my resume. Java, c#, objective c, javascript oh and now swift. Big deal. It is a tool.

But hey you think it is great. So be it. But at the end of the day swift brings nothing to the table to make it worth my time to learn and use. I still have to maintain and advance the object c code base. I still have to know that.
I still have to worry about lowest common demonstrator in development.

 

[samiznaetekto]

Or things of this nature have nothing to do with anything else aside from just random mistakes that happen to anyone at anytime without being related to anything else.

You don't understand. This "random mistake" is completely inexcusable for a programmer. If you make this mistake once, you should be not just fired, but banned from programming career altogether.

No matter WHAT, percentages on a pie chart must ALWAYS add up to exact 100%. No matter what. No excuses.

Obviously, you're not a programmer. But if you were my employee and had this level of "whatever" attitude to the quality of your work, I'd fire you instantly.

 

[Keirasplace]

Oh but I do but like others have said we are not going to tell you as I would expect a 1 star review in the morning . It is pretty clear you are insulting and do not understand what it takes to make a good app or be a developer. You see marketing and some how think it is fact.

Instead as multiple people pointed out that is not how it works.

If Apple forces us to go swift we will. It is not exactly hard to pick up and learn a new language. It would be few weeks to pick it up. The biggest lost would be the knowledge base on sites like stackoverflow. Swift is meh. It is another programming language so yeah it is meh. All it would be to me is another one to add to my resume. Java, c#, objective c, javascript oh and now swift. Big deal. It is a tool.

But hey you think it is great. So be it. But at the end of the day swift brings nothing to the table to make it worth my time to learn and use. I still have to maintain and advance the object c code base. I still have to know that.
I still have to worry about lowest common demonstrator in development.

Oh, come on, swift is so much like other language you should be able to pick it up as you go (seat of your pant programming, I've done that since the mid 1980s (then, it was assembly) ;-). So, yes nothing extraordinary. In fact, I have NEVER seen anything extraordinary in any language ever! Just hype. The development environment itself is always much more important to software and systems development than the languages anyway. You need a good way to build and assemble all your components together and make sure they work (and you don't break anything else while your building/adding stuff).

I haven't done full time software development (always preferred the systems and hardware side anyway) since the mid 1990s (leaving this stuff to my own very well paid skunk work squad ;-), though I try to keep up to date anyway so I know what the hell they're talking about in case they're trying to pull a fast one .

 

[proline]

Oh but I do but like others have said we are not going to tell you as I would expect a 1 star review in the morning . It is pretty clear you are insulting and do not understand what it takes to make a good app or be a developer. You see marketing and some how think it is fact.

Instead as multiple people pointed out that is not how it works.

If Apple forces us to go swift we will. It is not exactly hard to pick up and learn a new language. It would be few weeks to pick it up. The biggest lost would be the knowledge base on sites like stackoverflow. Swift is meh. It is another programming language so yeah it is meh. All it would be to me is another one to add to my resume. Java, c#, objective c, javascript oh and now swift. Big deal. It is a tool.

But hey you think it is great. So be it. But at the end of the day swift brings nothing to the table to make it worth my time to learn and use. I still have to maintain and advance the object c code base. I still have to know that.
I still have to worry about lowest common demonstrator in development.

Yup, definitely illiterate, unless you can find where I said swift was great. You must have one hell of an app if one bad review will sink you.

 

[C DM]

You don't understand. This "random mistake" is completely inexcusable for a programmer. If you make this mistake once, you should be not just fired, but banned from programming career altogether.

No matter WHAT, percentages on a pie chart must ALWAYS add up to exact 100%. No matter what. No excuses.

Obviously, you're not a programmer. But if you were my employee and had this level of "whatever" attitude to the quality of your work, I'd fire you instantly.

This isn't really what you are trying to make it out to be, not in the real world. And certainly in the real world people generally don't get fired over minor even if somewhat stupid things like this. Perhaps when you actually get out there and see how things work in reality you'll understand it all.

 

[asiga]

I belong to the 5% in the figure. It's the area of loyal Mac users, machines that used to work out of the box, without useless candy, and without Apple having total (technical) access to all your private data.

We're a 5%, so no wonder Microsoft had such a big success, and no wonder Apple had an smaller market than PCs. Now, with Apple markets bigger, it's obvious they had to embrace the Microsoft style in order to get a bigger market, while dropping the kind of products the loyal Apple user expected.

 

[CFreymarc]

If that's your one beef with swift you don't know much about coding.

Wow. I really hope you aren't a developer because you're pretty out of it if you expect to see other 'compiler houses' supporting Swift. Since you seem to have forgotten, swift is the native programming of iOS, far and away the most profitable mobile platform to develop for. That alone makes it "worth professional adoption" and guarantees its success. Swift apps will pull ahead of non-swift ones just as new swift only APIs come out from iOS 9 onwards, just as it was always is easy to tell who wasn't coding in Objective C. Market realities and competition will demand that successful developers switch to swift.

How much Kool-Aide did you drink at WWDC this year? I turned the "advanced Swift sessions" down and spent more time at more pragmatic API sessions.

If you think that all of Apple internally works in Swift to make iOS 8 and the eventual iOS 9, you are due for a big reality check. A lot of the iOS and Mac OS X are still written in K&R C along with -- gasp!! -- x86 assembly to avoid run-time virtual resolvent. Objective-C and Swift are just upper level rappers hiding tread calls. A lot of the iOS and Mac OS X are build outside Xcode!

After an extensive review of Apple outsiders (look it up), Swift is no "magic" language that will accelerate your app development. If anything, you will end up fighting compiler bugs, Xcode IDE bugs and erroneous stack mapping that comes with all first generation compilers and language specifications.

Your choice to run on this frontier like other explorers. The rest of us will passively learn from your mistakes and then build great apps learning from failed Swift app projects of this and next year.

If you really want to shoot yourself in the foot, write an Apple Watch app in Swift. I doubt the processor on that platform can run effectively the very large abstractions that Swift generates. You might as well write it in Python or Perl.

 

[oldmacs]

It is YOUR anecdote; I can spout the opposite and of course I'd be "right"...

BTW, LOTS is a weasel word that means nothing; you should thus work in marketing where they are kings of such words.

I have not seen a test which proves the opposite to what I'm saying. I know quite a number of people who have iPad 2s and I've read article after article, complaint after complaint which would suggest that the vast majority have found their iPad 2 to be slower after the update.