iOS Should I stall the development of my app until iOS6 is available?

[Sal Collaziano]

Hi all,

I have an app being developed and the company working on it is just about ready to get started. They say it won't be ready until December or so. Would it be a mistake to have them create this app for iOS5? Is it typically difficult/expensive to have an app updated to a newer operating system?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated...

Thank you

 

[perpenso]

Mistake to require iOS 6 ...

It would probably be a mistake to create this app for iOS 6 rather than 5.

While the upgrade rate for iOS users in amazingly high, its still likely to be in the 60-80% range for quite a while. Why decrease your potential market by 20% or more unless you really **need** iOS 6 specific functionality?

Most apps need no update at all to run on a newer version of iOS. Developer it for 5 and it will most likely run flawlessly on 6.

FYI. Upgrading iOS devices to a new version of iOS is one way, you can't go back unless you are jailbreaking. Keep some devices on iOS 5 for your own testing purposes. For example if you only have a phone and will update to 6 go get an iPod touch and leave it at 5.

 

[Sal Collaziano]

Sounds like great advice. Thank you very much!

It would probably be a mistake to create this app for iOS 6 rather than 5.

While the upgrade rate for iOS users in amazingly high, its still likely to be in the 60-80% range for quite a while. Why decrease your potential market by 20% or more unless you really **need** iOS 6 specific functionality?

Most apps need no update at all to run on a newer version of iOS. Developer it for 5 and it will most likely run flawlessly on 6.

FYI. Upgrading iOS devices to a new version of iOS is one way, you can't go back unless you are jailbreaking. Keep some devices on iOS 5 for your own testing purposes. For example if you only have a phone and will update to 6 go get an iPod touch and leave it at 5.

 

[Duncan C]

It would probably be a mistake to create this app for iOS 6 rather than 5.

While the upgrade rate for iOS users in amazingly high, its still likely to be in the 60-80% range for quite a while. Why decrease your potential market by 20% or more unless you really **need** iOS 6 specific functionality?

Most apps need no update at all to run on a newer version of iOS. Developer it for 5 and it will most likely run flawlessly on 6.

FYI. Upgrading iOS devices to a new version of iOS is one way, you can't go back unless you are jailbreaking. Keep some devices on iOS 5 for your own testing purposes. For example if you only have a phone and will update to 6 go get an iPod touch and leave it at 5.

I agree. Unless there are some "must have" features that make your app unique, you should try to support the oldest OS version you can.

For us, there are iOS 5 features that we really need, so we require that for our new apps. We're testing under 6.0, but we are not going to require it.

I'd suggest testing against iOS 6 early and often, but building with iOS 5 or 5.1 as the deployment target, or maybe even 4.2 if you can get away with it.

The OS had some major improvements (ARC, etc) in iOS 5 that make developing for it much cleaner and easier.

If you