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Comment by tadfisher | Hacker News Reader

As a developer, that long tail of folks on the previous major version really sucks with fast-moving frameworks like SwiftUI. There's no way my company (a banking app) would drop 10% of customers, so we typically do N-1 for iOS support.

Our Android app shipped almost 3 years ago with minSdk=24 (Android 6.0) and we haven't had to update it.

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The web browser is a big issue with this, too. A Safari release broke IndexedDB and they didn’t release a fix for over two months because browser updates are tied to the OS.

If there's a critical security update they can release an update within days. So it's got nothing to do with the complexity of releasing a new OS, it's just that they found IndexedDB not important enough to warrant an out of cycle update.

I write apps for a large regional grocery store chain, and we have to support N-2. Even then we get support emails every time we bump it up.

I work on Android apps for a food company turned media network.

We, to this day...with no talks of changing it any time soon, support all the way back to Android 5.0 (released in November on 2014).

I mostly work on Windows apps. People still complain when software drops support of Windows 7 released in 2009, or Windows 8 released in 2012. Despite none of them are supported by Microsoft.

It'd be a more fair comparison to take into account Windows 7's EOL which was just a year ago IIRC if you coughed up Extended Support money, its broad install base, and it being the last actually truly decent Windows that had a consistent UI across the place and no ads.

Windows 7 didn't have a consistent UI, though. In multiple places you could find Vista and XP-decorated panels. Your nostalgia is wrong.

https://ntdev.blog/2023/01/01/state-of-the-windows-how-many-...

Goes back to 3.1

That only continued to degrade with Windows 8 and 10 though.

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