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In an informal survey run by Craig Hockenberry of furbo.org, 95{813a954d5e225a1509f22204ece89c855080ce25555f20805f61bed63cbfde3b} of app developers are in the process of updating apps to iOS 7 and 52{813a954d5e225a1509f22204ece89c855080ce25555f20805f61bed63cbfde3b} are completely leaving iOS 6 behind. According to Hockenberry, updating to iOS 7 has proven more work than previous versions but the “results are stunning.”
At first glance it does seem curious that so many would leave an active operating system behind and in the fragmented world of Android it is less likely that developers would update apps to only the most current version. The reason you can do this with iOS is because the adoption rate of new software versions is extremely high among iOS users.
The survey was deployed via a Google form and in just 24 hours had 575 valid responses. As someone who works closely with developers but isn’t one, I can speak to the conversations that surround every update and the desire of developers to update to new versions but remain compatible as widely as possible. The good news is that the development community is onboard to get everything ready for the new version and that means we’ll all have less issues when we upgrade this fall. The bad news is that if you have an older device you may need to spend some money to upgrade to a new phone.
The other thing that Hockenberry described was the difference between adapting most apps and games. While it is a substantial amount of work to adapt elements such as navigation to the new iOS 7 style, many games are a different story:
“Games don’t have this problem: they’re basically all content. Considering these facts, my guess is that games will have much broader support for older versions of iOS.”
Since screen sizes are not likely to change again this year it frees up developers to change the style appearance to match iOS 7 and to update content, but to leave general sizes and aspect ratios the same. iOS 7 is one of the bigger updates in recent years and I am excited to see what all of my favorite app developers are going to do with it.
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