

Ask HN: Will you support XP when developing new software? - mingabunga

Now that XP has end of life, is it worth considering building software which will run on Windows XP if there&#x27;s extra development overhead? Anybody care to share their web stats on XP visitors based on regions around the world?
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patio11
All stats for last 6 months:

BCC (very non-technical, international audience with strong Anglosphere
focus): XP has 18% of Windows' 65% share. They index lower for actual
purchases, but by quick eyeball it is 10% or so of revenue.

AR ("less technical" audience, overwhelmingly US/Canada): XP has 11% of
Windows' 60% share. I am unable to quickly calculate their percentage of
revenue, but know off the top of my head that my two largest accounts have
hard requirements for XP.

This means that I'll probably continue supporting XP for those products,
although given that 10% of BCC revenue isn't all that much I won't exactly tie
myself in knots to do so.

By comparison, my blog (highly technical audience): XP has 6.5% of Windows'
40% share. That's below the noise floor to me. I don't track conversions on
the blog (if I did, they'd be to email signups) but my sense of things is that
if I 500ed everybody in that segment I'd be unable to detect any change in my
business as a result.

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zura
Patrick, I think you mentioned once, but could you please share an updated
info regrading BCC Web app vs desktop version share percentages?

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patio11
If you believe Google Analytics, we've had 14 trial downloads and 152 people
use the in-app check for updates functionality in the last 6 months. (You can
likely assume that the majority of those 152 people are customers who have
been using the downloadable version for years.) These numbers are low for many
reasons, most prominently the fact that we attempt to hide the trial download
and get people into the web app, partly because it is almost universally a
superior experience and partly because on a per user basis it generates far
less than 10% as many support issues as the downloadable version.

By comparison, the web app has added 25k users over the same interval.

So, percentage-wise, more than 99% of new users use the web app exclusively.

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brandonhsiao
Wow, that's such a foreign idea to me that XP has died. I still remember my
days of developing Windows applications, writing hacks for video games.

I don't develop for Windows anymore, but if I had to wager a guess, I'd
predict that it'll be like the older IE versions: officially dead, but
persistently popular, and grudgingly supported.

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deanfranks
Yes, a significant number of our users still use Windows XP and building
things to XP compatibility increases the chances of running under Wine for the
0.5% or so of our users who want to run linux.

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runjake
I'm inclined not to, but it depends on the market. Point of sales? Medical
equipment? ATM banking? You'd damn well support XP.

