Hey, this is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps.
Now today, we want to ask what Operating Systems should you code for.
You know, I'm a bit older than a lot of you, guys. And I can remember-
"Children sit down I want to tell you a story.." I can remember when Operating
Systems changed once every three to five years. I can remember when development
tools changed every few years. I could remember like reading two
years ahead of asp.net. What was going to be featured in that new
technology that we couldn't wait to get our hands on. And now, things move so fast
especially with mobile that we get a new Operating System every year.
One of the things we have to think about all the time when we're coding is what
platforms we're going to support. Because a lot of times, those new OS', they
don't filter out to everybody right away. And this was the same
back in my day with web, where we would have to put out a
web application, either for a corporation or a publicly facing one and we are- and
first question we have to ask is what is the minimum browser we're going to
support. So, you know back then it was- well, people still use IE5 in this
organization or whatever. We would have to- so all those new cool
things that would come out every year, we'd have to say, "Oh, that's so cool!"
But we can't use it because we have to support- we stop to support
Netscape or Firefox or whatever. So we'd have to- we would
have to shoot for the lowest common denominator and that net made sense for
a long time. The downside of shooting for the lowest common denominator is, people
who had- people were doing stuff that was much cooler, much more
current. And if you have to support something like IE8 or IE6 or whatever,
you just can't do all those kind of cool things everybody else does. Well,
you can but it's clumsy and all this kind of stuff. Now, with apps we're
kind of getting that- I mean we kinda have a similar thing and we have the-
just in the last few months we've had WWDC for Apple and we've had Google
I/O for for Google obviously. So, we learning about the new Android
and the new iOS operating systems. One of the things we always have to ask
is what is a low-- whenever we do something new, is what is the lowest
platform we're going to support. Not so much for our own app so, for our
own apps, if we put something out that say it doesn't support Android
like 2.2 or something. That's cool. We're fine with that. But
sometimes with clients- it's difficult with clients because they have to
know these kind of things. When we quote, we say, "Okay, we're only going to
support as low as Android - Android 3 Gingerbread or whatever."
It'd be good, so that way, when they come back to us later and say, "Hey, my friend
Dave, who last bought a smartphone in in 2010, he can't seem to get to the Android
app. What's going on?" And then you have to say, oh yes, because he's on Android 2.2 or
whatever. Then if they don't know about that, then they complain.
This is way more of an issue with Android than it is with iPhone. Now, like
over the last few months, they've announced new platforms. But it's
strangely enough, that they both Android-the Apple developer site and the
Android developer site both have up to the date stats on the distribution of
their operating systems. It's all up until June 5th, 2017, so just a few
weeks ago. It's so strange that it's same date. I'll put the links down in
the notes below so you can keep up with this kind of stuff
when you're making these kinds of decisions. You just have to look here.
First of all, in the Apple Developer site, you see they have this nice little chart
here saying, 86% of their devices have iOS 10, which makes
sense really, because Apple controls the hardware and the software. Unlike
with Android, where its all these different distributors, Apple
controls everything. But there are still 11% on iOS 9 and earlier
than that it's only 3% . I would never go below iOS- I wouldn't go below
iOS 8 just to be on the safe side. It's much easier and if
have an iPhone or an iOS device, you know why this is
because every five seconds they're telling you to upgrade. They're always
saying, "Hey, there's newer version available, upgrade now. Upgrade now." It was
like, I have all these testing devices in my bag and every time
I open it up, I'm bombarded with "oh. you have to upgrade. You have to upgrade."
Then you say, "Okay, yeah, just upgrade. Can't you just do this in the
backgrounds? No. No. Terms and conditions, right? They just- it's so
annoying. iphone just-- Apple just nags you all the time. You know,
it's not so much an issue with Apple. It's almost- it's nice that you don't
have to think about the lower levels of code and all those kinds of- although we
did have one just a few weeks ago, where we had- we were doing a hybrid ionic app.
And we had a bit of JavaScript that wasn't working in that and an older
version of Safari. So, we were using constants instead of fair. We were using a
constant and everything worked on all versions of iOS. But luckily, we have
in iOS- sorry -an iPhone 4 around and everything started breaking on that.
We're able to quickly go in it and fix it. It's just one of those
little types of things that a compiler doesn't pick up because it's
like in a web view. Now, let's contrast this with the Android-
the Android landscape. Now, Android is just all over the place. They have
this chart here on the Android developer website. We've done another
chart with based on this data, which I'll put up here in a minute, but here, you can
see that that Nougat, like the most recent one- is a most recent, it came out
last August .That has only got around 8% of of the entire ecosystem.
You still got loads of people on Marshmallow- mostly on Marshmallow.
A lot of people still in Lollipop, a lot of people still on KitKat,
but those lower ones, like we still- a lot of our apps, we still support
Android 2.3 and we really don't need to. But the reason for this is
because you- if you get your phone from Google, if you have like- I got
only get Nexus devices now because when those new platforms come up with a new
OS upgrades come out, I really want to get to- I'm going to try that
kind of stuff. It's just really cool and if you're like on Samsung or one of the
other manufacturers, they don't really have any incentive to roll out new
versions, when you bought the phone, they'll take
forever to roll out a version of of the new platform. And usually,
I can remember having a Samsung Galaxy S3, I think was
S3 and constantly waiting for them to bring out the new versions of Android at
that time. It was just- and nobody was sure whether or not they
would do it because they were jerks. So, they weren't jerks. But you know,
they got to go through and test everything, they got all this kind of
stuff for users that they don't even care. If they keep- because they've
already have the hardware, they're already on contract all that kind of
stuff, they would prefer you just go in and trade up to an higher phone. It's
much harder to do on on Android. I would say stick with Ice Cream Sandwich 4.1 or
above. But that's just me. I don't see any reason to go any lower than that.
Although, the whole thing with Android is it's a cheap phone right and the nice
thing about it being a cheap phone is that everybody has it and a lot of that
times people you know give it to their kids and all that kind of stuff.
Anyway, just really quick today. There's really good stats, I'll put the
links to them over here down below. That's it for today. I'll talk to you
guys. tomorrow.
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