iOS 8 Adoption Stalls at 47% of Users After Three Weeks

Unfortunately this year's release has been... well, awful, from both a user's and a developer's perspective.

* APIs that were fine in iOS 7 are now broken on iOS 8 devices (that's the OS I'm talking about, not the SDK). 6 -> 7 contained the biggest UI changes of any release, and on an iOS 7 OS, apps built under iOS 6 still looked like iOS 6 apps. How it should be.

* Developers saying they have to get/renew both iOS and Mac developer programs, and then request a refund for the one they don't want.

* Requiring 5GB for an over-the-air installation, which given how most devices are 16GB, is terrible. There aren't many end-users that would go through iTunes for this.

* Shocking performance on 4S and iPad 2. I disagree with allowing users to upgrade on these devices. My iPad 2 was unusable; even swiping on the springboard was dropping frames everywhere. Apps taking 10 seconds to load. That's not a good user experience, keep them on 7.

* Apple silently changing their approval processes (not allowed to authenticate through Safari now - it has to be through a web view, which doesn't handle SSO, and is a lot less secure).

* HealthKit bugs.

* The whole 8.0.1 disaster. I couldn't believe this one.

I was on iOS 5 until a few weeks ago. It's not because I don't like change, it's because iOS 5 did everything I needed it to do, it did it well and reliably. Upgrading is risky because you can't go back, and nowadays it's a total crap shoot in terms of whether the upgrade will actually be an improvement, or if it will be full of nasty surprises when you find that your favorite feature has stopped working or has simply gone away.

There's a sliding scale here. I don't think anyone is expecting app developers to support every OS version that ever existed. But iOS8 doesn't work on the iPhone 4, and according to comments on here works pretty terribly on the 4S, and even on the 5.

Supporting the current version and the most recent version doesn't feel like the biggest imposition. As a web developer we've adopted it - we just phased out iOS6 support now that we're looking at iOS8. And there aren't actually that many differences between 7 and 8 - especially compared to 6 and 7. What iOS8-specific SDK features are developers using that means they absolutely have to only target iOS8?

From the app developer perspective, it's really Apple's fault; they push HARD to force upgrades:

- Hardware DRM is used to block installation of old OS releases, mandating that developers maintain a stable of old hardware that they never reinstall just to be able to test on iOS - Critical security updates aren't provided for previous major releases if the device can run the next major release. iOS 6 was left with completely broken SSL certificate validation, and the last iOS 7 release also has known bugs; the only way to get a fix is to upgrade to iOS 8.

- Apple rapidly deprecates and removes old SDKs and toolchains from Xcode long before the devices supported by them have reached their end of useful life -- for example, dropping armv6 entirely due to clang having a litany of armv6 codegen bugs. The standard test framework -- OCUnit -- was deprecated in favor of an almost identical (but API incompatible) XCTest framework ... but Apple didn't bother to port XCTest for iOS 6 and (iirc) 7.0 devices, leaving developers with the choice of breaking testing on previous releases, or disabling/ignoring deprecation warnings and just being forced to refactor all their tests at an unexpected future date when Apple will drop OCUnit without additional warning.

Apple used to have a great backwards compatibility story; now, they're shoving both developers and users as hard as they can, and leaving an enormous amount of prematurely useless hardware and artificially enforced codebase bitrot.

What's worse is that Apple's pace is producing some seriously broken, buggy OS releases. Apple needs to return to the fundamentals of driving adoption by providing the best possible platform, rather than twisting and shimmying as fast as they can to stay just out of reach of the competition.

Working theory is that it cleared out things like Safari's caches (which I could have done without a wipe, of course), and cleared up free space. iOS isn't a happy camper when it lacks free space.