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Comment by reidmain | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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