Launching an app for iOS 5 and beyond only, a mistake? [closed]

Question

I'm new to apple's development scene and have been working on an app for the mass that has about 30 different view controllers. After doing my crash course on Obj-C and iOS development, I've decided to learn from the newest down, that is, iOS 5 API features downwards. I've realized that I've compromised my work so far by choosing to organize my screens with Storyboard. Segues are very handy, and linking the different buttons "on the fly" give me a pretty good overview of this already complex app.

I could go ahead and convert all the view controllers to single nib files and do all the navigation controlling stuff programatically. I pretend to reach as fas as many users as possible, so my question is: Is it a mistake to leave it like this and support iOS 5.x and beyond only? What would you do?

Thanks in advance, this website is absolutely amazing for clearing out questions. Congrats on y'all!

EDIT: My favorite part of Jori's tip on Matt Gemmell post on this subject:

There’s another thing about people who are already on the latest version too: they’re a growing market. The guys stuck behind on older versions are a shrinking market, because over time more and more people update (or get a new device that ships with the latest version pre-installed). Spending more time and energy to support an ever-shrinking market is lunacy.

I'm sticking with supporting iOS 5.x and beyond only.

Answer 1

For new projects, require whatever the then-latest iOS major release is. You will be stuck supporting it for a while, so don't make your life harder than necessary by having to support an OS that was obsolete at launch time. And while there are still some iOS 4 users out there, the number will rapidly dwindle (perhaps even by the time you launch).

A plausible (but admittedly not rigorously investigated) argument I have heard is that if someone is unwilling to do a free upgrade of iOS, or is uninterested in upgrading hardware that is so old it can't run the latest release, what are the odds they are going to spend money on your app?

Answer 2

My rule of thumb is to support the latest two OS versions - currently, that means iOS 5.x and iOS 4.x. This guarantees a very good coverage - anyone still on iOS 3.x either has a very old device (which wouldn't give the best user experience) or probably doesn't know what the app store is anyway.

In the case of storyboards, it does make it hard. I recently heard a stat that 70% of users have upgraded to iOS 5.x (don't quote me on that though) - but if this is the case, you're leaving 30% of potential users in the dark.

Tough call, I don't think there's any right or wrong answer - there's pros and cons to both. If it was me, I'd support iOS 4. But it's your call :)