Does anyone have any recent analytics on what percentage of active users (as in those actually buying current games) are on iOS5? Just wondering how sane it would be to release something that REQUIRES iOS5 about now.
I'd have expected the takeup to be rather more than that. Oh well... I was asking because there was an iOS5 only feature I was thinking of using and didn't want to conditionally support it, partly out of laziness I have to admit. I was also thinking back to when I released Ground Effect, which ran on 2.2.1 and was released a few months after 3.0 was released and what a pain in the ass that decision turned out to be when I couldn't find a 2.2.1 device to test on when releasing an update six months later. This is why I was asking for analytics from a recently released app. iOS5 download numbers are meaningless, i'm more interested in what percentage of the people actually buying games now are running the new OS. I guess this means the Analytics would have to be reporting Jailbreak status too as it's possible an app might appear to be used by, say 50% iOS5 and 50% iOS4 but it turns out most of those iOS4 users are pirates anyway. Who knows? Among the iOS users I know personally, the only ones sticking with an old OS jailbreakers who never want to go back to tethered but coincidentally, don't spend a lot of money in the app store anyway...
We just updated our Puzzle Moppet HD game to iOS5 MINIMUM recently as an experiment to gauge this exact scenario. IMO even if adoption rates are pretty low at the moment, in the long-run newer iOS devices will absolutely require iOS5 frameworks. Worth the risk if a game isn't doing that great
I don't have a recently released paid app, but can share the Mobclix Analytics on a year old free app. Obviously use has tailed off, but something is better than nothing. ShootStorm Survival is currently showing 36.1% use by all versions of iOS 5.0. As this might be affected by some other figures, I'll share them as well. 65% are using the latest version of the app that was released in October. Device share is iPad 65%, iPhone 22.5%, iPod touch 12.5%.
Whilst this won't necessarily reflect the TA crowd, we've found that iPad users in the older age groups - the types that play brain puzzles, card games and the like have never updated their iPad. When we moved Astraware Solitaire to 4.x and above our support team had to guide quite a lot of customers through updating their OS as they were blissfully unaware that they could. I think this is particular to iPad as many of the users are using them in place of a PC so don't plug them into the PC for app purchases, syncing etc.
You'll find many users like that on all the devices. Most of the population are casual users and they will never update their iOS because they just don't know they can or it will just scare them. I know that a lot of user don't even know that they can do a cold restart of their device. JC
I'd agree with you, but I think there's a higher percentage on iPad, or at least it seems that way from our support. I know when I did my mother-in-law's iPhone 4 update to OS 5.0 for her, she was still on 4.01! Alison
In our most recently released game, it looks like about 40% of our users are running iOS 5.0.x. I am a bit surprised that it's not a higher percentage. As far as jailbreakers are concerned, I don't see that as a significant issue. Historically (over more than 2 years) our user base of jailbreakers has been less than 10% of our overall users.
We just wrote about this topic on our blog: http://blog.thinktapwork.com/post/13826876901/requiring-ios-5 We released our game 2 weeks ago. Cricket Words was iOS 5-only because we are using turn-based gaming with Game Kit. We've decided to backtrack on the iOS 5-only thing and we've almost completed an update to our game that will allow for a one player mode that can be played on iOS 4.x devices. More details in the post.
Your game was free and you only analysed the data for two weeks Those reasons alone suggest that your conclusion "Its too soon for iOS 5-only. Lesson learned." may not be very applicable to the OP:
Just out of curiosity, how do you gauge the number of jailbreakers? I know people before used the number of Game Center accounts opposed to downloads, but even that isn't accurate. There are also many jailbreakers that do it just for the "can't live without" mods and not for piracy. How do you encompass those users into the count as well?
We used to check by looking for a proper certificate or something to that effect. Something I found through Google. It's possible that this code only tracks cracked software but I don't remember for sure. We don't bother to log or track this much anymore as we never ended up doing anything with the data. It was mostly done out of curiosity as you can't really stop pirates and we didn't want to interfere with legit jailbreakers. My point being that I think the number of jailbroken devices is a pretty small percentage.
For our Great Little War Game sequel we're requiring iOS5 for the async multiplayer aspect. We are presenting that as a greyed out button in the menu that reads "iOS 5 upgrade required" as a prompt. If they don't upgrade as a result then they don't care about that feature anyway. I do expect a lot of people to upgrade in fairly short order. The new iCloud stuff is a no-brainer as it benefits pretty much every type of phone user across the board.
An interesting article showed up in my twitter feed today about this topic. Here is the link: http://mattgemmell.com/2011/12/05/latest-version/
I disagree. At least half of the people who download our app can't install it. That seems bad to me. We'll know more soon as our 1.2 update, which we'll be submitting to Apple later this week, will include support for iOS 4.3. The true test will be if our download to install ratio is improved.
