Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 2, 2016 0:26 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Devuan Jessie beta released by ddevault
Parent article: Devuan Jessie beta released

> Have you ever tried to develop applications that support a broad range of Android versions? It's a bloody nightmare.
> I don't know much about iOS but I presume it's not much better with all sorts of apps only supporting the newest versions of iOS.

Are you seriously complaining that developers deliberately choose to take advantage of features only present in newer versions of operating systems? Have you actually checked the deployed market share of these older versions?

With Android, the collective install base for everything older than 4.0 is under 5%. But hey, you can download the SDK today, and target Android 1.0 if you choose... and it'll even run on a modern device. But it won't have access to any of the APIs added to Android in the past, oh, eight years or so.

With iOS, it's even more pronounced -- over 85% of the market is using the latest iOS version (9), and less than 6% of devices run iOS 7 or older. Granted, Apple is a lot more aggressive in deprecating older versions, but the fact remains that if you are writing a new application today, there's no point in targeting anything other than the last two versions.

> On Linux pretty much every application since the dawn of Linux will still run on Linux,

Only if you're able to recompile it, and everything it depends on. Hence the beef commercial concerns have with Desktop Linux.