I’m close to releasing an iPhone game and I’m thinking of having the base requirement of iOS 7 (which means i’m cutting off iPhone 3GS).
Should I? The game runs smoothy on 4S and above but is a little challenged with iPhone 4. Since I don’t have access to a 3GS, I have no idea how well it will run on it.
I would rather give my players a good user experience even if the cost is releasing a game to a - little? - smaller segment.
Thanks
The iPhone 3GS is currently 1.8% of the market. If you aren’t sure how the game would perform it would be preferable to cut it out. However by requiring iOS 7 you’re also dropping support for all of the other devices iPhone 4+ that are still running iOS 6.
Well I am thinking it probably wont matter, either the game will be a run away success and it wont really matter or it wont get any downloads at all. I guess there is a small chance that you land somewhere in-between and those few extra downloads will mean you dont get on the featured lists.
If the game is free, just put “Optimized for iPhone 4s” and let the player decide. But if it is a paid game I think this it is probably a good idea to let them know it will not play well on iPhone 4 or earlier. There is still a significant number of people on iOS 6, so don’t cut them out unless there is an iOS 7 feature they need to play.
https://developer.apple.com/ios7/ (bottom)
Because you no longer have a choice.
Wrong. You can still target iOS 5 or 6 but you just need to use the new tools plus SDK and also make sure your app also fulfills iOS 7 guidelines.
Correct. You build against the latest SDK and decide the minimum iOS version you will support.
Thanks everyone for the input. With over 75% penetration and increasing there is no reason not target iOS 7 exclusively in my case, since performance on older devise would suffer. Plus I doubt that anybody that is serious about mobile games hasn’t or will not upgrade to iOS 7 in the near future. I expect a huge spike when 7.1 comes out.