Just stop. You have no idea what you are talking about. You are just guessing incorrectly at how these companies collect their data and you think your personal anecdotes trump real statistics. You're ignoring the information right in front of you because you only see what you want to see.
Yes, but where did he say this? I want to be sure you aren't misinterpreting him or that there isn't another factor involved.
Mixpanel and Fisku have no means to figure who is running what version of iOS on what device
Of course they do. Do you really think they are just making the numbers up?
The only company who could is Apple, but they only track sold devices versus downloads of new OS versions.
No, that's not how they track it. Where did you get that idea from?
It seems to me you are denying the numbers based upon your feelings towards the update. It doesn't matter what you feel, the numbers are what they are. Almost everybody is using iOS 7+.
The programmer of "NovoCard" released that for iOS 5 or iOS6, he is now prevented from putting bug fixes for the old release into the AppStore because Apple requires him to release the "new release" for iOs7 and above.
Are you sure you aren't mistaking that for the fact that he's required to support iOS 7? Where's your source?
Your claim that 95% of the users are now on iOS7 and newer is simply wrong, regardless what Apple claims.
Nearly everyone I know (and has the knowledge how to do it) switched back from iOS7 to iOS6.
Your anecdotes about people you know do not outweigh the statistics gathered across all active users.
It's not just Apple that say that 95% of people are on iOS 7+. Mixpanel do as well. Fiksu put it at 90%. You get the picture. Multiple independent sources all say that the vast majority of people are using iOS 7+ regardless of your personal gripes with it. Just because you don't like it and you know other people that don't like it, it doesn't mean Apple are "simply wrong" when they say that almost everybody is using iOS 7+.
this is one good reason to use Obj-C instead of Swift: to support older iOS devices that cannot upgrade to iOS 7.
Not all that good a reason. 95% of active iOS users are already on iOS 7+ and that number is growing every day. The only devices that can't upgrade to it are the iPhone 3GS and below, the equivalent iPod touch, and the first generation iPad. There aren't many people using these devices any more.
By the time the OP learns to develop for iOS and actually builds his application, the number of people using older versions of iOS will be even lower. Unless you're willing to chase diminishing returns, it's not worth supporting anything beyond the previous major version, and even that's debatable.
Very different situation. I work with a lot of companies that develop iOS applications, and it's extremely rare for them to be more than a couple of years behind the cutting edge.
Then take a look back at all the new programming languages and frameworks Apple has introduced over the years and then shot in the head.
Modern Apple does it very infrequently, and usually, when they do, it's because they've got something newer to replace it. In this case, Swift is the newer thing.
No, you're right, there's no rule against supporting older versions. Xcode 6, which is the version released just the other day to support iOS 8 development, supports building applications targeting iOS 6 and up.
Apple have never explicitly required developers to support a minimum version of iOS, they just drop support for targeting older versions in Xcode a few years after release. Xcode 5, which was the most recent version until the other day, still supported iOS 4.3, which is over three years old and has virtually nobody using it.
It's technically possible to write an iOS application in nothing but C, but it's deeply unpleasant compared with using the right tool for the job. Just learn Objective-C. There's very little more to the language than plain C, but it makes things so much easier. Then, when you're familiar with the platform, pick up Swift. It's by far the better language, but it's a bigger change than C to Objective-C and it's still pretty immature.
One of the worst parts is all the retain and release calls.
OP says he's familiar with C, so he's already used to manual memory management.
Regardless, modern Objective-C uses ARC, which means all the retain and release calls are automatically generated by the compiler. You actually get a compiler error if you try to write the calls yourself these days.
god help you if you forget because there's no obvious way to see the problem.
Aside from the fact that Apple provides excellent tools like Instruments and a static analyser which lets you track down problems like this easily, so long as you understand one single principle, it's very difficult to go wrong with manual memory management on Apple platforms.
NARC. If a method begins with new, alloc, retain, or copy, then you own it and it's your responsibility to release it. Otherwise, you don't need to.
The only people who struggle with memory management are the ones that don't understand this very simple rule. Learn that, and it's effortless.
My boss, who wrote all the Objective-C stuff, says that Objective-C has become a mess over the past 5-10 years as Apple is promoting Objective-C for both iOS (iPhone, iPad) and OSX (desktop) applications, which has caused all kinds of problems and bloat. I've had all kinds of problems with Objective-C, so I don't doubt his characterization of it.
To be frank, it sounds like none of you have more than a beginner understanding of the language. How can you not be aware of NARC or ARC? It's the kind of thing you learn on day one.
If the men have a significant response rate, then just maybe that means the problem is YOUR QUESTION IS TOO VAGUE, rather than both genders experiencing sexual issues.
Wow, how unscientific can you get? You've decided on what you want the result to be and you're discarding data that doesn't fit.
Sexual assault is really, really common. It's not just another word for rape, it covers any unwanted sexual touching. I had a woman I didn't know grope me as I was leaving a club last week. That's sexual assault. You may think that it's harmless - I wasn't particularly bothered by it - but regardless of severity, it's still sexual assault.
I don't believe a fucking word. They'd throw a baby off a bridge for a $2 bump in their stock price.
How would providing data to the USA government raise their stock prices? If anything, it would lower them.
You don't really have to trust Apple to do the right thing here. If - as you say - they are only motivated by profit, then look at what is more profitable for them. Their business model doesn't depend on access to their customers' personal data and habits. Google, on the other hand, makes use of their users' personal data and habits, however benignly you choose to judge that.
Basically, privacy is a competitive advantage Apple have against their biggest rival in the mobile market. If you think they are only motivated by profit, then the reasonable conclusion is that they will act to preserve their customers' privacy rather than disclose it.
You're massively overreacting to a biased headline. What is meant by "Apple locks NFC to Apple Pay" is simply "Apple have only provided APIs for Apple Pay so far".
This is pretty standard practice with new Apple hardware features.
Bluetooth? Originally developers couldn't access that at all, only the higher-level gaming APIs used it.
Touch ID? Again, developers couldn't access that at all to begin with, but iOS was released yesterday and that introduced an API for developers to use it.
The camera? Originally developers could only tell the system that they wanted a photo. Now we've got fine-grained control over shutter speed, etc.
Apple have a habit of introducing hardware features then providing a third-party API after they've had a chance to see it deployed at a large scale. If you are a long-time iPhone user, you've seen them do this time and time again. The fact that there isn't an API for it on day one doesn't mean that they are trying to lock it away.
Apple haven't said that they will open-source Swift. The only thing they've said so far is that they've been concentrating on getting it to 1.0 first and haven't made a decision about open-sourcing it yet.
Not really. GCC is inconvenient in several ways. See this comparison for details. Most of them are technical, but a couple are related to the license being GPL. Clang and LLVM are "truly free software" as well, so Apple clearly aren't averse to "truly free software".
Half of it doesn't make sense and the rest is factually inaccurate. For instance, Apple won't open-source Swift because people don't want to buy cheap iPad clones? Huh? The foundation of Swift began in the open-source world? Nope.
Any article like this that doesn't mention Apple are the primary driving force behind the open-source LLVM/Clang tools is missing a big part of the puzzle. Apple have a track record of working on this sort of stuff openly once it gets to production quality.
Prime Music does not shove songs onto your phone using your data plan.
By default, Apple does.
Nope. Automatically download purchases using your data plan defaults to off. If it used your data plan, it's because you went into Settings and switched that option on.
If this album is 100 Mbytes at AT&T's roaming price of $19.95 per megabyte, this is going to cost me $1,995.
It's not going to cost you anything unless you went into Settings > iTunes & App Store and told it to use mobile data for automatic downloads. That's off by default, which means it only performs these kinds of downloads if it's connected to the Internet by WiFi.
If you buy a product from Apple, it's not really yours.
It's not about the product, it's about the account. People with "download new purchases automatically" switched on aren't forced into it by Apple, it's a user preference. The problem here is that Apple marked the album as purchased for their iTunes account, and that kicked off the normal download that happens when the user deliberately buys music.
It's a side-effect of how the system is supposed to work according to the user's preferences. It just fucked up badly because it wasn't designed with this use-case in mind.
The user getting the album downloaded automatically is just a symptom. The real problem is that instead of setting the price to free, Apple added it to people's iTunes account automatically. It's really got nothing to do with a product "not being yours" at all. It's working exactly as the user set it up to work - the problem is with the account, not the product.
I think you've misread "not much to mention" as "not much that is unprecedented". These are two very different things. There's a lot to mention about the iPhone 6. You yourself have already mentioned quite a bit about it.
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Just stop. You have no idea what you are talking about. You are just guessing incorrectly at how these companies collect their data and you think your personal anecdotes trump real statistics. You're ignoring the information right in front of you because you only see what you want to see.
Yes, but where did he say this? I want to be sure you aren't misinterpreting him or that there isn't another factor involved.
Of course they do. Do you really think they are just making the numbers up?
No, that's not how they track it. Where did you get that idea from?
It seems to me you are denying the numbers based upon your feelings towards the update. It doesn't matter what you feel, the numbers are what they are. Almost everybody is using iOS 7+.
Are you sure you aren't mistaking that for the fact that he's required to support iOS 7? Where's your source?
Your anecdotes about people you know do not outweigh the statistics gathered across all active users.
It's not just Apple that say that 95% of people are on iOS 7+. Mixpanel do as well. Fiksu put it at 90%. You get the picture. Multiple independent sources all say that the vast majority of people are using iOS 7+ regardless of your personal gripes with it. Just because you don't like it and you know other people that don't like it, it doesn't mean Apple are "simply wrong" when they say that almost everybody is using iOS 7+.
Not all that good a reason. 95% of active iOS users are already on iOS 7+ and that number is growing every day. The only devices that can't upgrade to it are the iPhone 3GS and below, the equivalent iPod touch, and the first generation iPad. There aren't many people using these devices any more.
I appreciate that it's frustrating being left behind, but when only 0.66% of active iOS users are on version 5, it's very difficult to justify the extra work involved in supporting them.
By the time the OP learns to develop for iOS and actually builds his application, the number of people using older versions of iOS will be even lower. Unless you're willing to chase diminishing returns, it's not worth supporting anything beyond the previous major version, and even that's debatable.
Very different situation. I work with a lot of companies that develop iOS applications, and it's extremely rare for them to be more than a couple of years behind the cutting edge.
Modern Apple does it very infrequently, and usually, when they do, it's because they've got something newer to replace it. In this case, Swift is the newer thing.
No, you're right, there's no rule against supporting older versions. Xcode 6, which is the version released just the other day to support iOS 8 development, supports building applications targeting iOS 6 and up.
Apple have never explicitly required developers to support a minimum version of iOS, they just drop support for targeting older versions in Xcode a few years after release. Xcode 5, which was the most recent version until the other day, still supported iOS 4.3, which is over three years old and has virtually nobody using it.
It's technically possible to write an iOS application in nothing but C, but it's deeply unpleasant compared with using the right tool for the job. Just learn Objective-C. There's very little more to the language than plain C, but it makes things so much easier. Then, when you're familiar with the platform, pick up Swift. It's by far the better language, but it's a bigger change than C to Objective-C and it's still pretty immature.
OP says he's familiar with C, so he's already used to manual memory management.
Regardless, modern Objective-C uses ARC, which means all the retain and release calls are automatically generated by the compiler. You actually get a compiler error if you try to write the calls yourself these days.
Aside from the fact that Apple provides excellent tools like Instruments and a static analyser which lets you track down problems like this easily, so long as you understand one single principle, it's very difficult to go wrong with manual memory management on Apple platforms.
NARC. If a method begins with new, alloc, retain, or copy, then you own it and it's your responsibility to release it. Otherwise, you don't need to.
The only people who struggle with memory management are the ones that don't understand this very simple rule. Learn that, and it's effortless.
To be frank, it sounds like none of you have more than a beginner understanding of the language. How can you not be aware of NARC or ARC? It's the kind of thing you learn on day one.
Go to Settings > General > Usage > Battery Usage and it will tell you what's been using energy.
Seems to be okay to me.
Wow, how unscientific can you get? You've decided on what you want the result to be and you're discarding data that doesn't fit.
Sexual assault is really, really common. It's not just another word for rape, it covers any unwanted sexual touching. I had a woman I didn't know grope me as I was leaving a club last week. That's sexual assault. You may think that it's harmless - I wasn't particularly bothered by it - but regardless of severity, it's still sexual assault.
Can you substantiate this? Every time somebody has said this to me and they've gone into specifics, it's been bullshit.
Same here. Which anti-trust laws? Be specific.
How would providing data to the USA government raise their stock prices? If anything, it would lower them.
You don't really have to trust Apple to do the right thing here. If - as you say - they are only motivated by profit, then look at what is more profitable for them. Their business model doesn't depend on access to their customers' personal data and habits. Google, on the other hand, makes use of their users' personal data and habits, however benignly you choose to judge that.
Basically, privacy is a competitive advantage Apple have against their biggest rival in the mobile market. If you think they are only motivated by profit, then the reasonable conclusion is that they will act to preserve their customers' privacy rather than disclose it.
You're massively overreacting to a biased headline. What is meant by "Apple locks NFC to Apple Pay" is simply "Apple have only provided APIs for Apple Pay so far".
This is pretty standard practice with new Apple hardware features.
Bluetooth? Originally developers couldn't access that at all, only the higher-level gaming APIs used it.
Touch ID? Again, developers couldn't access that at all to begin with, but iOS was released yesterday and that introduced an API for developers to use it.
The camera? Originally developers could only tell the system that they wanted a photo. Now we've got fine-grained control over shutter speed, etc.
Apple have a habit of introducing hardware features then providing a third-party API after they've had a chance to see it deployed at a large scale. If you are a long-time iPhone user, you've seen them do this time and time again. The fact that there isn't an API for it on day one doesn't mean that they are trying to lock it away.
Apple haven't said that they will open-source Swift. The only thing they've said so far is that they've been concentrating on getting it to 1.0 first and haven't made a decision about open-sourcing it yet.
FFS, I wish people would at least attempt to avail themselves of the facts before spouting off like this.
You don't have to switch off automatic downloads of new purchases over cellular connections because it's switched off by default.
Not really. GCC is inconvenient in several ways. See this comparison for details. Most of them are technical, but a couple are related to the license being GPL. Clang and LLVM are "truly free software" as well, so Apple clearly aren't averse to "truly free software".
To be clear: Apple aren't just a contributor, they created Clang and employ one of the LLVM project's founders to work on LLVM, Clang, and Swift.
Half of it doesn't make sense and the rest is factually inaccurate. For instance, Apple won't open-source Swift because people don't want to buy cheap iPad clones? Huh? The foundation of Swift began in the open-source world? Nope.
Any article like this that doesn't mention Apple are the primary driving force behind the open-source LLVM/Clang tools is missing a big part of the puzzle. Apple have a track record of working on this sort of stuff openly once it gets to production quality.
Nope. Automatically download purchases using your data plan defaults to off. If it used your data plan, it's because you went into Settings and switched that option on.
It's not going to cost you anything unless you went into Settings > iTunes & App Store and told it to use mobile data for automatic downloads. That's off by default, which means it only performs these kinds of downloads if it's connected to the Internet by WiFi.
It's not about the product, it's about the account. People with "download new purchases automatically" switched on aren't forced into it by Apple, it's a user preference. The problem here is that Apple marked the album as purchased for their iTunes account, and that kicked off the normal download that happens when the user deliberately buys music.
It's a side-effect of how the system is supposed to work according to the user's preferences. It just fucked up badly because it wasn't designed with this use-case in mind.
The user getting the album downloaded automatically is just a symptom. The real problem is that instead of setting the price to free, Apple added it to people's iTunes account automatically. It's really got nothing to do with a product "not being yours" at all. It's working exactly as the user set it up to work - the problem is with the account, not the product.
I think you've misread "not much to mention" as "not much that is unprecedented". These are two very different things. There's a lot to mention about the iPhone 6. You yourself have already mentioned quite a bit about it.
If we found lower forms of life on another planet, would we roll our eyes at them and ignore them? Or would we be fascinated by them and study them?
That's a ridiculous thing to say.
What's your source for this? The profit margin on the iPhone 6 is lower than for earlier iPhone models at the time of release.