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Constant fear of Apple breaking backward compatibility by shipping new versions of their operating system every year.

Apple is now running a beta versions of iOS 8.x and iOS 9.

This puts a massive brake on the impulse towards creating new products if you have fixed resources. It creates a strong bias towards optimising existing products even after the point of diminishing returns.

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While I have faced this issue a few times, especially with some UI elements when moving from 1 version to another, I found that the situation is much better in iOS (deprecated APIs are supported for a while before being removed) when compared to Android (of course, its my anecdotal experience and I'm not trying to generalise here) where some of the APIs were completely dropped or the behaviour was totally different between incremental versions. In our case we we had to implement the same feature in 2 different ways to support 4.0 and 4.1 Android versions.

That makes a lot of sense. I guess work is never done since iOS is always being updated.

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