Confirmed: if you’re a developer who’s only compiling for the latest iPhone firmware, you are locking potential customers out from your App Store products. Ars looks at a one-week and 90-day breakdown of iPhone use by firmware platform.
Which SDK should you compile for? 2.2.1? 2.2? Choosing an active SDK version can affect both your target audience and possible App Store sales. We recently wrote about SDK choices, noting that building for 2.2.1 (the latest version, as of this writing) might cut out users who had yet to upgrade from the 2.2 firmware.
Ars readers responded both in comments and e-mail, asking whether delaying the firmware upgrades were typical of iPhone users or whether they indicated the relatively small audience of jailbreakers, who purposefully held off on upgrades. To answer this question, we turned to a few experts on the subject.
Michael Burford of Headlight Software has created more than a dozen App Store products. Headlight, which uses its own internal advertising solutions, is able to capture firmware specs from the platforms it publishes to. Burford was kind enough to share with us a one-week snapshot for approximately 20,000 unique IP addresses. These addresses represent about half (49.75 ercent) of iPhone units, with the remaining units being iPod touches of various vintages. The numbers he collected offer a short-term look at which platforms are using which firmware releases.
| Firmware | Percentage |
|---|---|
| 2.0 | 0.37% |
| 2.0.1 | 0.19% |
| 2.0.2 | 0.49% |
| 2.1 | 3.93% |
| 2.1.1 | 2.90% |
| 2.2 | 26.61% |
| 2.2.1 | 65.49% |
Admittedly this data is a little skewed in that it shows per-use, not per-platform information. At the same time, it provides valuable insights about the distribution of firmware. Take a look at these numbers: by compiling to 2.2 (approximately 92.10 percent of use) rather than 2.2.1 (65.49 percent of use), you may increase your potential sales by nearly 50 percent above the expected 2.2.1 installations. That’s staggering.
To get another view of the information, I contacted Eric Litman of Medialets. Medialets is an analytics and ad platform that provides solutions for native mobile applications, working with over 700 iPhone developers to provide analytics, and in some cases rich media ads, into their apps. Litman was kind enough to task one of his engineers to find out how the firmware installations broke down over a longer time frame. Bill Hatch assembled a 60 day overview, representing over 12 million devices, offering a firmware-specific report.
| Firmware | Percentage |
|---|---|
| 2.0 | 2% |
| 2.0.1 | 2% |
| 2.0.2 | 5% |
| 2.1 | 35% |
| 2.1.1 | 7% |
| 2.2 | 39% |
| 2.2.1 | 9% |
Looking at this 60-day snapshot offers valuable information that augments the one-week picture. Recall that firmware 2.2 was released on November 21, 2008 and that 2.2.1 debuted on January 27, 2009—approximately 45 days ago. All the numbers you see in this table reflect data that was collected from a month and a half after the iPhone had already moved into 2.2 firmware.
You cannot look at these numbers and not realize that adoption delays will affect the way you sell applications. During January and February of 2009, a third of iPhone and iPod users continued using firmware 2.1. Software compiled for and deployed solely to 2.2 or later, let alone 2.2.1, could not be installed on these units until the user upgraded.
What can we conclude from these numbers? I think it’s obvious that user-delayed upgrades are a real phenomenon that affects the entire user base, and not just a niche phenomenon of the jailbreak community. As with any consumer device, users are not going to automatically upgrade their units even though iTunes offers one of the cleanest and easiest upgrade solutions for users. So, here are a couple of suggestions to take away with you:
First, after doing as much bug evaluation and testing as possible, consider compiling for as much backward-compatibility as possible without sacrificing stability in order to maximize your potential customer base. The lower the firmware release number you compile for, the greater the chances you’ll be able to run on any given iPhone or iPod touch.
Second, make any minimum firmware requirements clear in your App Store marketing materials. Don’t let users buy your application and then be aggravated when they cannot install it on their device. Recent purchasers of Ego and Oregon Trail have been surprised, and not in a good way, by discovering that these applications are 2.2.1-only releases.
Yes, there are certainly trade-offs when choosing a distribution SDK. Our earlier talked about bug issues and stability. However, there’s also something to be said for increasing compatibility, especially with numbers as compelling as the ones shown here.
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