14 DAY TRIAL // Craig Hockenberry, a Twitterrific developer at The Iconfactory, says coding for iOS 7 isn’t exactly a walk in the park. But that’s not stopping him and the rest of the developer community from porting their IPs to the new mobile software in time for its fall debut.
While fiddling with code to make one of his company’s apps compatible with iOS 7, Hockenberry was curious to know how many other developers were doing the same thing.
So he just asked by putting out a simple survey that any developer could access (complete with a trick question).
His findings were astonishing. Provided that the survey is accurate, almost every developer on the planet (95%) is currently working to make his or her apps compatible with iOS 7.
“I then calculated how many were going to require iOS 7 (and drop support for iOS 6),” writes Hockenberry, adding that “Just over half of developers (284 of 545) were leaving the past behind.”
If you’re a consumer of apps, there’s some good news and some bad news too. The good news is your favorite titles are likely to be “ready for action come this fall,” according to the developer.
The bad news is “If you’re someone who has a device that’s a couple of years old, now’s the time to start thinking about upgrading. Many apps will require a device capable of running iOS 7,” says Hockenberry.
But there’s some more good news. According to him, most video games are likely to have “much broader support for older versions of iOS.”
The reason is simple (if you’re a developer, that is):
“Most of the difficulty in adapting apps is changing navigational and content elements to match the new style. Games don’t have this problem,” he says.