Ask HN: Will you support XP when developing new software? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will you support XP when developing new software?

7 pointsmingabunga7 comments

Now that XP has end of life, is it worth considering building software which will run on Windows XP if there's extra development overhead? Anybody care to share their web stats on XP visitors based on regions around the world?

View on HN

All stats for last 6 months:

BCC (very non-technical, international audience with strong Anglosphere focus): XP has 18% of Windows' 65% share. They index lower for actual purchases, but by quick eyeball it is 10% or so of revenue.

AR ("less technical" audience, overwhelmingly US/Canada): XP has 11% of Windows' 60% share. I am unable to quickly calculate their percentage of revenue, but know off the top of my head that my two largest accounts have hard requirements for XP.

This means that I'll probably continue supporting XP for those products, although given that 10% of BCC revenue isn't all that much I won't exactly tie myself in knots to do so.

By comparison, my blog (highly technical audience): XP has 6.5% of Windows' 40% share. That's below the noise floor to me. I don't track conversions on the blog (if I did, they'd be to email signups) but my sense of things is that if I 500ed everybody in that segment I'd be unable to detect any change in my business as a result.

Patrick, I think you mentioned once, but could you please share an updated info regrading BCC Web app vs desktop version share percentages?

If you believe Google Analytics, we've had 14 trial downloads and 152 people use the in-app check for updates functionality in the last 6 months. (You can likely assume that the majority of those 152 people are customers who have been using the downloadable version for years.) These numbers are low for many reasons, most prominently the fact that we attempt to hide the trial download and get people into the web app, partly because it is almost universally a superior experience and partly because on a per user basis it generates far less than 10% as many support issues as the downloadable version.

By comparison, the web app has added 25k users over the same interval.

So, percentage-wise, more than 99% of new users use the web app exclusively.

So what browsers they are using?

Wow, that's such a foreign idea to me that XP has died. I still remember my days of developing Windows applications, writing hacks for video games.

I don't develop for Windows anymore, but if I had to wager a guess, I'd predict that it'll be like the older IE versions: officially dead, but persistently popular, and grudgingly supported.

Yes, a significant number of our users still use Windows XP and building things to XP compatibility increases the chances of running under Wine for the 0.5% or so of our users who want to run linux.

I'm inclined not to, but it depends on the market. Point of sales? Medical equipment? ATM banking? You'd damn well support XP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com