Ask YC: To support Tiger or not to support Tiger?

[whalesalad]

We've been building this app for a while, and have been continuing to support Tiger. We haven't been able to quite a few things available in Leopard because we're remaining backwards compatible for Tiger. What do you guys think about this. Our product isn't out yet, getting close, but there are tons of things we would love to do but cannot due to this Leopard/Tiger war. Should we ditch tiger?

[boucher]

Release what you have, which works in Tiger. But then, add your new leopard only features for your next version, and don't look back. Although you may lose a little business in the short term, there's very little evidence to suggest you'll fail by going Leopard only. I can't think of a single mac shareware app that has failed because it was only available to the new OS. The kind of people who jump at Apple's latest OS release are the same kind of people who are going to download your application and tell all their friends about it.

[CPops]

I think the answer depends on what your product and target market is.

If your product is designed for technical-users, it's likely that most of them have already migrated to Leopard, making the headache of ensuring support for Tiger likely not worth it.

If your product is designed for non-technical users, the headache of remaining backwards-compatible is probably worth it based on the vast number of folks who don't upgrade until they buy a new computer with a new OS pre-installed.

[goofygrin]

According to this: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1483 you could be losing 90-30% of your potential user base.

[whalesalad → goofygrin]

That's exactly the sort of thing I've been looking for. Thanks for the link man, appreciate it.

[thaumaturgy → whalesalad]

I can add that I've been doing part-time tech support (only two weeks left! Hurrah!) for a while, and I'd say that of the Mac users that call in, most of them are still running Tiger. Leopard wasn't quite compelling enough for many people to justify the price tag.

That said, if you really can't advance your current version while remaining backwards-compatible, then why not fork the product and make the Tiger version a little bit cheaper? I've seen that from other developers, and absolutely love them for it.

[demallien]

Forget Tiger and go with Leopard. Don't waste your time implementing Leopard features yourself by hand just so that they can run on an obsolete system. In two years time, those features will be worth exactly zero to your company, when all of the new features that you could have written instead using Leopard's functionality will still be worth something.

Joel Spolsky says it best here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/18.html.

"The developers who ignored performance and blasted ahead adding cool features to their applications will, in the long run, have better applications."

[Hoff]

Do not look where the market is now nor even at where your competitors are now. Now is interesting, but it's also largely irrelevant. Look instead at where the market will be when you can get your product out.

Do not accept what your customers want now as your future goal. That now will be history when you ship.

Listen with caution to your existing customers that either don't or haven't yet purchased the flagship upgrade from the leading vendor in the market. They probably won't buy your stuff in any quantity, either.

Existing customers will almost never tell you they want to buy an upgrade.

There are other potential schemes - such as parallel product release streams for 10.4 Tiger and for 10.5 Leopard - though these should be approached with caution and particularly with an eye toward the added expenses that will be incurred. These tend to be feasible in larger software products, when there are established revenue streams and customer bases and with the requisite source code management skills and tools present.

[maryrosecook]

You may already know this, but the developers of both Delicious Library and TextMate are going Leopard-only for their version twos.

The DL dev's justification is that almost all the people who spend money on software will buy Apple's stuff first, thus being Leopard-only cuts out only a small amount of your market.

TextMate's dev justified it in a similar way, saying that 90% of his customers are early-adopters who would be on Leopard as soon as it came out.

It is interesting to note that both of these apps have niche markets (people who organise their media collections and programmers/geeks). Thus, the devs are probably confident in their predictions about not reducing their potential customers too much.

[christefano]

It really depends on what you want to do that isn't possible in Leopard. You haven't said what that might be.

If it's something that pivots entirely around a feature in Leopard, like Time Machine integration, then go for Leopard only. Otherwise, release for both Tiger and Leopard. Why not? Not everyone is using Leopard yet -- I read somewhere that the adoption so far is about half Leopard and half pre-Leopard. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but I have a hard time believing it's true.

I only updated to Leopard on my main workstation about a week ago.

[andrewf]

If you (or someone you know) runs a website whose patronage would be representative of your target audience, take a look at the webstats.

At an established software company, this is a very easy question to answer - you just look at the user agent stats on your purchase page.

[dangrover]

What specific Leopard features do you depend on?

[whalesalad → dangrover]

Good question. I'm just a front end guy, so I am not exactly sure what we can and cannot do, or if we actually can do a lot of this stuff in both, etc....

But the developers tell me that Leopard offers a lot of animations and stuff (CoreSomethingSomething? haha) that Tiger does not do.

[timnic → whalesalad]

I think they were referring to "Core Animation", a Cocoa framework for building smooth transitions in the GUI. This was AFAIK a by-product of the iPhone development.

But development for Leopard is also nicer because you can now use Objective-C 2.0 and garbage collection and lots of other new classes, like e.g. NSOperation which helps development for multi-core processing.

[dangrover → timnic]

Depending on how long you plan to spend developing the program...

..if you're just relying on Core Animation for a few animations, you can write those yourself. And if you're not going to use Obj-C 2.0 GC for performance reasons, strike that off.

You can easily put Leopard-specific features/hacks in, too. I developed ShoveBox for Tiger, but I've had to add in some logic around how the app works with Spaces.

...but if, by the time you're done, the target audience of your app will have already gotten Leopard, it might be useful to just target it. There are a lot of useful enhancements all around the API that will save you time.