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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I was very excited about this, so I tried installing it on my iPhone 4S, with iOS5, and it says:

    This app requires iOS 6.

Really?! Already?? :( I didn't upgrade because I want to keep my maps app. I hope Marco changes it to be iOS 5-compatible, since I know a lot of people who aren't upgrading to iOS 6 until it has decent maps.

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Apps that have hundreds of thousands of daily users are already seeing over 80% of their users are on iOS 6 and this is only after 21 days of it being available.

Any app I make from now on will be iOS 6 and up. The amount of time I spend not having to worry about iOS 5 bugs and testing allow me to add more features that will reach the majority of iOS users.

Spending tens (or possibly hundreds) of hours to make something that already works in iOS 6 work in iOS 5 to reach a small subset of iOS users is not worth it for most developers.

What about iOS6 is necessary to display plain text in a magazine format? Was displaying plan text impossible to do before the miracle that is iOS6? It sure sounds like it based on these comments that a text based magazine can only be available on iOS6.

Actually iOS 6 does introduce a set of new APIs for attributed strings that would make something like this a lot more performant and obviate the need to use web views. I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of the driving factors in making that the minimum target.

Well, a lot _easier_, anyway; you could in principle do it with Core Text before, and Marco probably has experience in this. He did mention on his podcast that he'd consider an iOS5 version if iOS6 exclusivity is a problem.

iPad 1 is stuck on iOS 5, which is 17 million units according to this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad

And there are over 400 million iOS devices. If you think you can get a large enough percentage of iPad 1 users to make it worth you while then develop for it. I'd much rather spend my time ensuring it works well on 300+ million other devices.

I smell some false dichotomy here. I don't know much about iOS development, but it sounds baffling to hear that iOS 6 is so different that it would take "hundred of hours" just to make sure the app is usable on the previous release.

As always, depends what you're doing, but this is not a crazy statement.

There are certainly fewer bombshells in iOS6 than iOS 5, but it's no stretch to say that adopting iOS 5 early on was worth 100s of hours -- it had huge improvements for dev.

Also keep in mind that the fewer OS versions you target the less testing you have to do.

what I find really weird is why iOS 6 doesn't run on iPad 1? I know there's an issue with memory, but I think if you disable background apps you essentially get past that.

And what makes you think this "stuck in iPad 1" user base is the target for a paid for tech geek Magazine by Marco?

I still only have my iPad 1. I don't use it often enough (maybe 10 hours a year) to justify getting a newer one.

I mean, it's good entertainment on a plane, but otherwise it's just a handy thing to lend to non-technical people who are uncomfortable with keyboards. If I'm not in front of my computer, my phone is more useful for getting to the web.

It sounds like you don't use it enough to justify having that one!

... but basically what you said backs up the target audience argument.

>If I'm not in front of my computer, my phone is more useful for getting to the web.

Outside the house maybe.

In the bedroom/sofa/crapper the iPad cannot be beat by the phone or the laptop, though.

What it does is, it frees you from having to be tied to a chair and office in your own house, for browsing, checking your mail and reading stuff.

Apps that have hundreds of thousands of daily users are already seeing over 80% of their users are on iOS 6

Link(s) please.

I work on ScoreMobile and we're at 79%. Probably over 80% by now.

60% of Pocket users in five days. http://getpocket.com/blog/2012/09/more-than-60-of-pockets-da...

http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/

http://insights.chitika.com/2012/ios-by-device/

The Build & Analyze podcasts (which the author of The Magazine hosts) has talked about it multiple times http://5by5.tv/buildanalyze/96

I do appear to have overstated the 80% number but at this point in time but by the end of the year I'd be shocked if it wasn't over 80% based on the rate of adoption and then number of iPhone 5 being sold.

The folks behind Discovr Music say they're at 77% iOS 6 adoption: http://discovr.info/2012/10/discovr-ios-6-adoption-tops-77-i...

What are some specific differences between iOS 5 and iOS 6, when it comes to app development?

The biggest by a long shot for me is UICollectionView. The open source drop-in replacement to get it working on sub iOS 6 is a fantastic effort, but it's not there yet (animation).

One thing that I find incredibly fast and easy to do on iOS6 vs. iOS5 is implementing post-to-Facebook (and Weibo) using the new Social Framework. In iOS5, you would have to

- Register your app on Facebook

- Integrate the FB SDK (or maybe a third-party wrapper)

- Implement various authentication/delegates/callbacks

- Test that you did all of these things correctly

This might not sound like a big deal but it does save some time.

Not that I disagree that iOS 5 was obsolete the second that iOS 6 was released (the numbers agree with us), but...

    if (NSClassFromString(@"UICollectionView")) // or something that makes a lot more sense, but that came to mind immediately
    {
        // facebook stuff
    }

    // Twitter.framework stuff

Uicollectionview was already mentioned, so I'll add autolayout to the list. Incredibly useful feature that gets rid of a lot of brittle code.

If you have an iOS developer account you can view the What's New document at https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/releasenotes/General...

Aside from UICollectionView and AutoLayout that were mentioned, there is much easier way to localize the app (one storyboard and many "strings" files, more ways to easily customize UI elements, and a few ARC things (no more manually managing dispatch queues, zeroing weak references, etc.)

and a few ARC things

According to this document [1]: ARC is fully supported in iOS 5, and there aren't any iOS-6-only Objective-C features.

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/Objecti...

There are a few iOS 6 ARC specific features. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12730202/do-you-need-to-r...

Yeah. GCD queues are now Objective-C classes IIRC.

For this particular app, attributed strings are probably going to be the big thing.

Marco talked about his decision to require iOS 6 in previous episodes of Build and Analyze.

He wanted to try requiring iOS 6, because it would help him write cleaner code internally, but he actually has a version of the app that will work with iOS 5. Depending on adoption of the iOS 6 version, he may or may not "revert" support back to iOS 5.

The adoption rate for iOS6 has been amazing compared to previous versions that weren't OTA. Over 60% in less than a month (according to a statistically significant and diverse user base source: http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/). I recall seeing some iOS5-only apps when it was adopted this widely after a few months.

OTOH, that graph sure has plateaued at around 60% for the last week. I think there is a fairly significant group of iPhone owners who just don't care about OS updates and never even notice that indicator on Settings telling you that you can update.

Or this: http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/05/after-early-boom-new-number...

Sure, it's slowed down - everyone has gotten the pop-up by now telling them to OTA update so those that are left didn't want to right away. But that just puts us in the same boat we used to be; a slower adoption rate as we wait for them to manually do it.

If they don't care, that's fine. They'll start to care as more things go iOS6 only. Just like people stay on XP forever until there's a reason to upgrade.

But 60% of the user base (including those who can't update like iPad 1, not just 60% of eligible) in less than a month? As a dev that make me really really happy and not scoff at considering going iOS6 only.

Oh definitely it's a good adoption rate. I just think a lot of people were thinking "60% in a week! We'll be at 90% in a month!" and that seems overly optimistic at this point. And if it plateaus at 70%, how many developers are willing to cut off 30% of their customer base?

History has shown that won't be the case. We might not be at 90% by the end of the month but mark my words, the exponential growth of iPhone sales in which each new model eclipses the entirety of iPhone sales up to that point has a pretty drastic effect on the old OS percentages.

The combination of the iPad, iPad mini, iPhone 5, and new iPod touch all running iOS 6 and the aggressive older device update strategy means we are pretty much assured 90% by the end of this year, if not sooner. With the notable exception of the original iPad, the iOS devices that can't run/won't run iOS 6 are a drop in the bucket.

The other thing to note is that as devices get older, users tend to enjoy them less and therefore screw around on them less. This naturally results in less app usage, less browser usage, appearing in less statistics, etc...

So while the exact percentage of all iOS devices running iOS 6 might take longer than a year to hit 90%, I suspect app developers will have a fairly different picture painted for them by their personal usage statistics.

He talked about this over multiple episodes on Build & Analyze. You would be shocked at the iOS 6 adoption numbers.

Apparently I'm the only guy still using a first-generation iPad.

Oh well.

There's only 15 million of you, if I recall correctly, and most of them have already coughed up more for the retina one. But there are 70 million iPad 2's and 3's, and I read on MacRumors that Apple expects to sell at least 10 million "mini" iPads in Q4 (not to mention a few more millions of iPad 2's and 3's, and a gazillion more iPad 4's when they introduce them), and almost all of them (except a few who are cranky about the maps, which would soon be forgotten when Google releases its maps app) are on iOS 6.

I too am starting a new iPad app, and it'll be iOS 6 only - because it'll be released early next year, and because it's really, really easier to only target iOS 6 as there have been many improvements in the APIs that literally cuts development time in half.

Most people don't care about maps on iPad nearly as much as on iPhone. I don't think limiting to iOS6 on iPad should be so bad.

I have one too actually, but I don't care because I'm not into paid ipad magazines.

Are you into free ones? shameless plug

Worked. Downloading... Nicely done!

Sweeeeet! I hope you enjoy it. The article on Rwanda in the first issue just won an award, so be sure to check that out.

You're clearly waiting for someone to put this link into the thread: http://www.overnightbuses.com/

Secretly, yes. :)

I have a first generation iPad, too. I had some magazine subscriptions on the iPad that I got for free because I was a subscriber of the physical magazine. With the exception of traveling, I preferred the real magazine. The metaphor of how ads are displayed in physical magazines, paging, etc. didn't carry over well for me in the iPad.

While travelling, I thought it would be cool to have access to a library of magazines to peruse. I ended up mostly just watching videos.

I would be agreeing with the other commenters suggesting that iOS6 adoption rates are good and blah, blah if I didn't have an iPad 1! Since I do, I'm fucked on this, and it's a bummer.

This is why I decided last week to sell my first gen iPad to Gazelle for $160. (Not intended to be a plug: see also Amazon, Apple, craigslist, eBay, uSell, and others.)

I am going to live without an iPad until this mini/nano/Air thing shows up, hopefully soon, and put the dollars toward one of those.

Or you can just wait a month until the authors post the content on their own site. Not unlike having HBO: you pay a premium for content available on HBO's terms, or wait a while until they eventually release it for digital download. In both cases, the choice is entirely on you.

You should actually try out iOS 6 maps: I find them to be much better than the original Google maps.

They're faster, use less data, and are much smoother. The directions are also a lot easier to follow since it adds turn by turn and you get to see the (animated) directions on the lock screen.

Based on what he's said on his podcast, that isn't going to happen

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