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A comment on Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game. Parent comment

Re:Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game by jankins on Thursday March 27, 2014 @09:51PM (#7484807)
> I wonder why a game which is basically a 4x4 grid doesn't work on every single version of iOS. 1024 works just fine.

It's pretty much an effort vs. payoff thing; the dev environment get nicer each iteration, and iOS < 6 is in a fractional minority.

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Re:Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game by MBCook on Thursday March 27, 2014 @10:38PM (#7484981)
Yep. iOS 6 has some nice APIs, iOS 7 is even better.

According to a company called Mixpanel Trends [1], iOS 7.x is currently on 89% of all Apple devices. iOS 6 is just under 10% and iOS 5 and before is under 1.5%.

Since you can't downgrade and devices ship with the latest version, that means that anyone running iOS 5 or iOS 6 is also running an older device with lower performance. If you're doing a resource heavy game it may not even run well on those devices even if you did work to support them.

1. https://mixpanel.com/trends/#report/ios_7

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Re:Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game by chubot on Thursday March 27, 2014 @11:05PM (#7485088)
Sure, but my point is that this doesn't qualify as a "resource heavy game" at all.
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Re:Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game by MBCook on Thursday March 27, 2014 @11:06PM (#7485095)
Threes certainly wouldn't no. But the ease of development and small size of the lost market makes it a pretty easy choice for many developers.

Even finding a way to test software on iOS 5 or 6 is a huge pain. Apple makes it very difficult to test on anything other than the latest version unless you happen to have a device with that OS laying around.

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