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It's About Time

This weekend I have been putting the finishing touches to a bug fix. The bug arose from the fact that IOS 4 treats time differently to IOS 3.2 in some instances. I have an app out that automagically downloads an RSS feed of articles. The app was developed and tested to work with at least IOS 3.2.

This was based on the ideal of producing apps that are available and work with the older versions of the Apple operating systems to allow device owners who don't have the capabilities to update their software often to obtain and run our apps. A bad decision for two reasons.

Reason one: The majority of device owners are quick to update their software as shown in the statistics I found in this article from Cocoanetics.

According to Marco Arment, as of March 2011, the statistics for devices running 4.0 and above is 98.2% and devices running less than 4.0 = 1.8 %

Therefore putting in the extra work to ensure apps work on older O/S's to cater for a relatively very small amount of device owners is not really needed.

The second reason is that the testing and bug fixing cycle is expanded as apps now need to be tested on two devices (not simulated) to verify they work correctly.

Something I neglected to do when completing my app. It was tested on 3.1.2 and worked fine. After release we were alerted that on IOS 4 the RSS feed of articles were no updating. After another set of testing it came to light that the date parsing I was using was correct for IOS3 but not for IOS4.

So a few lessons learned, if you intend to supply our app products on anything less than IOS4, you must test on devices that are both the minimum O/S version you intend to supply and also IOS4.
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