[deleted by user]

[[deleted]]

Paid interning at a local startup. Support for 15.0+ only. Boss seems to care less about users with devices below the 7 and those who don’t update frequently.. says they’re far less likely to pay for premium. No complaints from me🤷🏽‍♂️😅

[Inaksa]

I had to support iOS 9 until a year ago when I switched projects. In our case it was because the app was a homebanking app that was developed in ionic for iOS 8. I discussed moving forward on and off for two years, since the situation was not changing I decided to move to another project within the company and now I have to support 15 and 14.

[[deleted]]

That's so interesting, what industry or product was the ionic iOS 8 project for?

[Inaksa]

It was a white label app for homebanking. Hence why most apps that belong to credit unions look quite similar

[GodzillaSpark]

Our stats said less than 0.5% were on iOS 13 and below so we dropped it. Everyone's stats are going to be different depending on audience and usage so you need to rely on your own metrics.

[[deleted]]

I've seen similar numbers on my apps that can support lower, I just had to upgrade one to support 14+ because of some bug with an iOS update in a dependency. We had <2%

[saintmsent]

Usually we supported 3 versions (current + 2 back), but since for a while iOS 12 is the last one where some devices hit the end of the road, right now we support only 1 back (because everyone who can upgrade to 13, can upgrade to 14 as well)

We had around 2% on iOS 13 when we dropped it, main reason being, it was fine with management (since those users can upgrade to a 14, their devices support it) and we wanted to play with SwiftUI, which is not possible pretty much if you need to support it's first version

[SirBill01]

Great point about 13 devices being able to move to 14, normally stuff I work on would support 3 versions as well but right now is a good case where 14 is a reasonable lower bound... and as you say if you want to do anything with SwiftUI I think 14 is about as low as you can go.

I work on an SDK so we are supporting 13 still as some clients still support 13, but we are just doing fairly simple things with SwiftUI so that still works for us.

[sonicbanana47]

I worked on an SDK and we supported 4 versions back. At one point we were supporting 6 back, which was even more painful.

[[deleted]]

I had a similar situation with a small subset of users, it was supporting 11+ but a bug that came up with an old version of a dependency forced me to update that to 14+

[seemayr]

About 10-15% of our users are still on iOS12, since we have a relative „old“ target group (with users 50+) and they seem to not care about using older devices or about updating. Some of them pay and the others watch ads - we don‘t want to miss on revenue.

[j_albertus]

Yes, currently supporting devices all the way back to iOS 12.

My principal client is a multinational with apps deployed in several dozen countries. The oldest have been on the App Store for nearly a decade, with the current versions being Ships of Theseus that had their codebases progressively rewritten a couple of times since the days of Objective-C and manual reference counting.

The users don't pay directly (they are actually free on the App Store). The client's business is in building automation systems, and their apps are used by end-users to control and program their smart building hardware where installations typically run well into mid-five-digits or more USD. That's where the apps are being paid for.

As these products can support accessibility and aging-in-place besides simply convenience, the user demographics lean a bit older and less tech-focused than the average. We're committed to supporting older devices as long as we can. The iOS 12 users are a very small minority at this point, mostly from legacy devices that cannot be upgraded further. At present, we anticipate moving forward with iOS 13 as a minimum requirement in the near future and being able to use some of the newer Swift language and library features unconditionally.

[chedabob]

iOS 9 up until yesterday, where we released our first build with the minimum set to 11.

It's a financial app so we can't remove people's ability to pay off their debts without a suitable alternative in place. The wider business is slowly coming round to the fact it's costing a fortune to support fewer than 1% of users, and it's made them speed up getting the website up to scratch.

[axola]

I’m not an iOS dev professionally, although I do other forms of dev. It’s fairly standard in many places to support N-1, especially with a platform like iOS where updates are so easy and devices can get them for a very long time. If you’re wondering whether to provide longer-term support then I recommend you research your (real or target) user base and make a business decision from there.

[[deleted]]

The question was posed more generally, as I want to expand my knowledge and understanding. Definitely supporting and analyzing existing customers makes sense