Is it worth supporting iOS 3 in 2011? « How to make iPhone Apps and Influence People

20Mar/116

Is it worth supporting iOS 3 in 2011?

Now that we're well into 2011 the question has to be asked: Is it still worth supporting iOS 3 devices? There's a lot of cool APIs and language features you can take advantage of in iOS 4 (blocks - woo!), most new work I'm involved is targeted at iOS 4 and soon we'll have iOS 5 - but are you cutting off paying customers or future paying customers by requiring iOS 4.0 and above?

My short answer: no, not really. iOS 3 numbers are in steady decline and I don't think new or existing apps will be alienating too many active customers by requiring iOS 4+.

Quick Stats

Only 11% of my active users are running less than iOS 4.0
Only 6% of active users of my main paid app Seoul City Metro are running less than iOS 4.0

Now, lets have a look at some of the data I've compiled. Hope you enjoyed the graphs!

This first graph includes all the data I have collected so far summed up by month and major iOS version. The decline of iOS 3 is clear here with iOS 4 accounting for 89% of all active users by March 2011.

The second graph shows a sample of the last week's data split by iOS version.

The third graph splits up the 89% pie piece from graph 2 and shows the uptake of each distinct iOS 4 version. I found the iOS 4.3 update really interesting, since it was released on March 11 (only 9 days ago) and already accounts for 30% of users. (FYI: the first occurrence of iOS 4.3 was 15-01-2011) The previous version (iOS 4.2.1) is the second highest total at 55%. This means 75% of iOS4 users are actually quite up to date!

The same graph for the iOS 3 distribution (not included) shows the latest version of non iPad iOS 3, 3.1.3 accounts for 81% of users, and the version prior to that (3.1.2) accounts for 17.6%.

Graph four looks at the difference between paying customers and non-paying customers. The results are interesting but as I expected; paying customers are more up to date than non paying customers. There are half the number of iOS 3.x users (by percentage) of my $1.99 app as there are using my free app. It makes sense that people who pay for apps keep things up to date more than your user with a phone full of free apps.

P.S. I was inspired to pull all these details together today when I was noticed that my blog post about Delhi City Metro's iOS usage statistics had been linked to on Stack Overflow . I hope you find this all interesting.

P.P.S. Since July 2010 I have been collecting a basic set of anonymous data from users of my apps on launch. I collect iOS version, app version, unique device ID and the device type, I have recorded just over 109,000 pieces of data so far.

Posted by Jesse

Tagged as: iOS3, iOS4, Stastics Leave a comment

Comments (6) Trackbacks (2) ( subscribe to comments on this post )

Rob
March 21st, 2011 - 12:02

I’ve been pondering the same for a while (and I’m certainly glad I was able to get away with going OS 4 only for certain projects). Quite glad you’ve been able to put this together – as I know I can use it to justify what’s worth supporting to the powers that be.

It’s actually even more important now we’ve got the 2nd gen iPad with a dual-core CPU so we can take serious advantage of Grand Central and the other APIs present in 4.x.

Really glad you got these stats up there – seriously appreciated
ahlongxp
April 11th, 2011 - 01:52

Thanks a lot for sharing.
I hope this post will be updated once in a while.
Mikkel Bjerg
April 11th, 2011 - 18:07

Do you also have information about how many of your devices are the “old” iPod Touch, which cannot be upgraded?. That is how many of your users you would keep out of the loop, by only supporting iOS 4
Stan Sieler
May 17th, 2011 - 04:05

Hi,
Great article, thanks!

I was wondering: does “the latest version of non iPad iOS 3″ mean you rarely see iOS 3 on iPads? I’m curious because we’re debating removing support for iOS 3 from our not-yet-released iPad app. (We use some iOS 4 features, and it’s getting tedious to write code to handle things properly

Stan
Jesse
May 22nd, 2011 - 15:33

Hey Stan,

I have a comparatively low number of iPad statistics but if I grab the most recent two weeks (8-22 May 2011) of iPad data I’m seeing that ~ 12% of my iPad users are using iOS 3.2.x. This is pretty surprising to be honest – but it’s a very small percentage of my total numeber of users, and it could just be a handful of regular users skewing the stats on that. I’d still be going 4.x +.
Jesse
May 22nd, 2011 - 15:36

Mikkel,

My little statistics generation app I wrote doesn’t differentiate between the specific iPod hardware versions.