Which version of OS X should my program target?

Question

Hi,

We're building an application for OS X, and we can't rely on our users all having upgraded to Snow Leopard, or whatever the latest version is. We want to make sure that as many people as possible can use our app, but we also don't want to throw away some improvements that were made in OS X version if only 1% of users are stuck using earlier versions.

Is there anywhere I can find information on the proportions of people that are using each version of the OS? Or is there some "common wisdom" on the issue that real mac developers know?

We don't need any superfancy graphics or 3d animation stuff, just plain old windowing APIs - but we've already run into one problem where "NSStreamDelegate" isn't supported prior to snow leopard.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think I'm one of the last holdouts with a still-functioning Powerbook G4. Its upgrade path ends with Tiger. On behalf of all those who won't get rid of computers that still work fine (if a bit slow by modern standards), please target 10.4 !

Of course by objective standards, you probably want to target 10.5. It adds nice programmability improvements, and really, I don't know a single person still using 10.4 other than me.

Answer 2

Web stats from Quantcast, late February 2010.

North American stats, but might serve as a guideline.

Version    %
10.6    27.3
10.5    52.1
10.4    17.2
Other    3.4

Omnigroup also provide some useful insight into updates to their installed base. You can click through to see breakdowns by major and minor versions on their site. For July 2010 they have:

Version    %
10.6    53.3
10.5    21.0
10.4    25.6
Other    0.1

Answer 3

As for NSStreamDelegate, it has been available as an informal protocol (i.e. a category of NSObject) since 10.3. It is just that Apple decided to make it into a formal protocol, since Objective-C 2 has an @optional methods.

So, it's not that you're using new functionality only available on 10.6.