

Updated iOS device and OS version stats from Instapaper - siglesias
http://www.marco.org/2011/08/13/instapaper-ios-device-and-version-stats-update

======
trotsky
Funny that the two ipad models are dead even considering they've shipped more
than twice as many original ipads. It would seem a full 50% of gruber's
readers replaced their ipad's with the ipad 2. No wonder apple is crushing
tablet sales.

~~~
tmgrhm
>It would seem a full 50% of gruber's readers replaced their ipad's with the
ipad 2.

What does Gruber have to do with this? Do you mean Marco?

~~~
hboon
He might have meant for you to replace "gruber's readers" as "Apple fanboys".

------
reidmain
Does anyone know of any other developers that have published these kind of
stats?

I suspect that Instapaper was extremely popular with the techie/start-up crowd
when it first launched but it has become quite well known in these last three
years and I'm wondering if it has pushed through to your regular Joe consumer
yet.

It would be great to get a couple more points of data so we can show that most
people are using iOS 4 to help push forward the phasing out of iOS 3 support.

------
viggio24
I completely agree. Using 4.x today allows to write code in a much cleaner and
efficient way; a few examples: gestures (for iPhone), blocks, GCD. Besides
multitasking and background processing allows features that were impossible to
get or required complicated hacks. And now that we must provide iOS4 and iOS5
mixed compatibility, we cannot absolutely maintain any compatibility with
iOS3.

~~~
reidmain
It is quite impressive that in just over a year developers are able to start
requiring iOS 4.

I hope that iOS 5's OTA updates we could get to the point where iOS versions
older than a few months are considered obsolete.

Apple has done a great job at fostering this culture of upgrading as soon as
possible. Microsoft and Google still have problems were the average consumers
see OS updates as something that can cause problems, not bring new features.

~~~
tmgrhm
>I hope that iOS 5's OTA updates we could get to the point where iOS versions
older than a few months are considered obsolete.

While a very nice idea, I'm not convinced it much will change due to old
hardware being incompatible with new versions of iOS. It's rarely the x.y
versions which are the barriers to progress, but the x.0 versions.

~~~
reidmain
That is true but Apple does seem to have a higher adoption rate with their
physical products. iOS 4 killed support for the original iPhone and now iOS 5
is killing support for the iPhone 3G.

When the iPhone 5 comes out this fall I think by June of next year there will
be enough penetration of iOS 5 that some apps will be able to put that
requirement on it.

Heck if we're lucky iOS 6 will finally kill support for non-Retina displays.

------
phren0logy
Interesting stuff. Keeping the OS so up to date has got to help both users and
developers. As a nitpick, the "OS/CPU is at least this" plots are screaming
for a CDF graph.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_distribution_functio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_distribution_function)

------
RyanKearney
And when iOS 5 is released Instapaper will become completely unnecessary.

~~~
siglesias
Maybe for some users, but by no means everybody.

1) Reading List is Safari only. 2) Many popular apps (such as Twitter for iOS)
actually support Instapaper's Read Later, whereas I'm not sure that there is a
Read Later API (someone correct me if I'm wrong). 3) Instapaper has social
sharing built in.

~~~
Skroob
I've been using the iOS 5 betas and I can tell you I use Reading List and
Instapaper completely differently. Instapaper has always been long form
reading, stored for later (and potentially offline). Reading List, I use to
quickly transfer a site I'm currently reading from my desktop to my iPad or
iPhone, incidentally replacing an app I wrote to do exactly that. I guess it's
time to take Panic's Audion advice and retire that app ("When you double click
the competition in the morning, that's a pretty good sign that it's time to
hang up your hat!", <http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/>)

