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Comment by _2z1p | Hacker News Reader

Over 80% of iPhones are running the latest version. I’ll take that any day as a developer over the Android hellscape of versions that need to be tested for and supported.

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/01/apple-shares-ios-16-ado...

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> Over 80% of iPhones are running the latest version.

If the past is any indicator, the number will be over 90% by the time iOS 17 ships this fall.

I doubt iOS 17 will be adopted faster than previous versions. For one, they are dropping support for multiple device generations this time.

They are actually of the same age, the iPhone 8 and X came out at the same time (yes it’s still confusing now)

> I doubt iOS 17 will be adopted faster than previous versions. For one, they are dropping support for multiple device generations this time.

Each release gets adopted faster than the previous version; there’s no reason to expect anything different this year.

Also, just about every new iOS release drops support for older iPhones; this isn’t new.

No longer requiring developer accounts to install the iOS 17 beta will only increase the rate of adoption—many millions of users who aren’t developers will be running it before the official release in September, unlike years past.

Some input as an Android dev: the API level stuff is not nearly as much as a problem as it was some years ago. Nowadays you can easily require 23 or 25 (see https://apilevels.com/) - since 23, there were definitely some changes, but not terribly big ones that are really painful.

I'm rather getting a headache with new form factors (window insets, foldables, tablets being revived).

Also: Usually all google libs are backwards compatible to 21. The new ui system (Compose) just gets shipped with the app itself, increasing download/installation size. Apple does not do this afaik, they require a recent minimum OS version for compose ui.

As an iOS developer SwiftUI not being a library has been a huge pain, there were major bugs in point releases of iOS 13/14. It has improved a lot but there's still major headaches version to version.

> over the Android hellscape of versions that need to be tested for and supported.

Isn't really an issue these days. Almost everything Google puts out is in the Jetpack libraries and backported many major versions.

Same, but its still a 1 year lag on relying on a new API. Probably 2 or 3 in practice if you support the old OSes for a bit. Could be zero lag.

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