is it safe to make iOS 4.3 as deployment target for app?

Question

Does anyone have any up-to-date statistics regarding percentage of users using iOS 4.3? I'm trying to determine if it would be safe to set iOS 4.3 as my deployment target, since there's a bug that wasn't fixed until 4.3

Thanks.

Answer 1

Here are the 8th Sept 2012 stats from David Smith's blog for his Audiobooks app that get 100k weekly downloads:

5.1.x -> 87.8%
5.0.x -> 3.3%
4.3.x -> 5.2%
4.2.x -> 2.9%
4.1.x -> 0.7%
4.0.x -> 0.2%

This excludes the 3.x OS, which I believe is less than 1% of total users today.

That means you would lose ~4% of iOS users by building your app with the iOS 6 GM Seed SDK (which restricts your target to iOS 4.3 and above).

Answer 2

Take a look at this forum post:

http://me.lt/650xH

The people posting are some pretty "heavy hitters" -- Bump and Kayak -- so I bet they have a lot of usage data. That said, it's an older post now (my my how fast things move in iOS world).

Their answer is that basically 92% is on 4.x, and it breaks down from there.

Answer 3

What percentage of the iOS app customer base do you want to target (or give up)? How long will your app be on the market?

Some older statistics from Bump suggests that more than half of the iOS app customer base is using an OS update within 2 months of its release date, going up over 90% (using that update or newer) around 6 to 9 months later.

Answer 4

I don't have any concrete stats, but from past experience you always have a good % of users who don't upgrade their phones. Perhaps there's a chance you could target 4.0 and put a conditional around your code? What is the bug that wasn't fixed till 4.3?