Developing Mobile Apps – Most Devices Or Most Recent?

Filed in Apps, Stats Reviews on Sep.27, 2011 By Keith Lunt

So you have decided to develop a brand new mobile application. You are at the point of deciding what features to include and realising that some of what you want to offer is only available to those on the recent operating systems. What do you do? Do you develop for the masses, which increases your target audience, or develop for the latest operating systems and produce a really hot app?

If you are developing for Apple then the decision really is taken for you. Currently there is IOS 3 or IOS 4 and the technical capabilities between them aren’t too bad, with Apple forcing users to upgrade as updates are available. However, there is no such compulsion with either Blackberry or Android. In fact, with certain handsets an upgrade is impossible.

So, which way will you err? Looking through the Blackberry stats from May this year, ‘only’ 68% of subscribers are on version 5 or 6. To cover 96% of the subscribers you need to cover from OS 4.5, which is another 5 incremental versions.

However, let’s look at the number of people actually downloading apps. Suddenly, the percentage of subscribers on versions 5 and 6 jumps to 88% when you look at just those actively downloading free apps. Even better, for paid apps this percentage jumps to 94%.

What am I getting at here? Well, whilst it might be tempting to try to support the masses, to produce an app that will be relevant to most handsets, it would appear that the most active markets are those with modern handsets. There could be many reasons for this, from people upgrading so that they can use these features to these people being more likely to be willing to pay out for upgrades and apps.

Whatever the reason might be, the answer seems to be obvious to me. Don’t hold back when developing apps. Go with the latest technologies and produce ‘with it’ apps that take advantage of the latest features. Make your apps appeal to those users who are up to date and let the others catch up. You won’t lose much of your market, but your market will love what you do even more.