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superchunk on 13 June 2012
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rocketpig said:
superchunk said:

We are now seeing the same thing in iOS btw. Now that Apple has put out more than 4 phones, many features and entire OS upgrades are not on the older phones. Sure those are four year old products, but there is a big difference in putting out one phone a year and one every month.

iOS'es fragmentation is nearly non-existent. Right now, a little over 80% of users are on iOS5. By the time iOS6 rolls around, that number will probably be at 85% or better. Apple didn't release OTA updates until iOS5 so I'm sure that's slowing some users down a bit. Moving forward, I think iOS6 be right back at 90% saturation when iOS7 is due to release. No matter what a company does, some users will retain an old OS because their phone is jailbroken, because they fear updates, or because they're just incompetent and can't use their own device. Anything over 75% is good. Anything over 90% is awesome. Apple usually ends up somewhere close to 90% by the time the next update is ready.

From a developer standpoint, features (or lack thereof) are easy to workaround on older phones. What's important is not having to test on multiple operating systems. Apple has done an extremely good job of making sure that developers have as many tools as possible to make their apps run on as many devices as possible.


As I mentioned is like comparing apples to oranges. Having one product a year makes it very easy to keep the OS on all devices. Its really nothing that great or negative. It just depends on who you are and what you want.

Since iOS is popular due to iPhone iPod and now iPad, a dev an make a lot of money and have relatively easier, but higher up front cost, by starting with iOS and since Android is massive on clearly king of marketshare, they can have no up front cost and a longer dev / test cycle.

A consumer has far more freedom of choice, not only in hardware, but with software configuration and personalization with Android, but with iOS they have a simple standard that will be kept in the loop for at least three or more years. However, even with that you lose some stuff. Like Siri and various other new features that will come out over time. Apple may choose to not allow even a one year old product to have it. There is no technical reason Siri couldn't have been on iPhone 4 and various iTouch/iPod devices, but it wasn't.