When my iPhone 3G got insanely bogged down by poorly-optimized code in iOS 4 I got frustrated with Apple and decided to look into an Android phone. The results were horrendous, and I ended up getting the 4S to maintain my sanity. My temptation to go into the world of Android was dashed by Android and the mobile-makers that use it.

When I get an iPhone I know it’ll just work and I don’t need to pay attention to annoying numbers that only somebody who spends too much time with computers would know. I know what these numbers mean and I understand them, I just don’t want to deal with it – it’s a personal preference to not have to think about mHZ or cycles anymore. Android’s version naming after pastries* doesn’t help make anything clearer either. I’d rather think about what cool apps I can get instead.

Essentially I got turned off of Android because all of a sudden I went from thinking ‘phone’ to thinking ‘complex technology’ and had to pay attention to not only phone manufactures but what version of firmware that phone had on a carrier. No thanks. I know that people will think that I was lazy in my search and you know what I was.

If I saw a solution that clearly provided the most recent Android version and was a good build I would’ve got it. Instead every time I got close another ad, article, blog, would raise doubts and I suffered choice paralysis as a result.

That’s just my experience though, and a rant at that.

The reason I’m even writing this is that a recent investigation into adoption rates of new software makes Android look, well, not too good.

Essentially Apple has it’s users upgrade quickly and Android users take longer. This results in a clear OS version to build on for Apple whereas on Android you’d have to develop for multiple platforms.

This graph sums things up well:

Fortunately for us, the folks at The Next Web can summarize the findings with far less ranting than me. Their dissection of the above information can be found in their article about why developers love iOS.

They got a choice quote from a developer on why the developer dropped support for iOS 4 on the iPad.

Tapbots recently launched a new version of its popular Twitter app Tweetbot for the iPad. This was offered as a separate app from the iPhone version, allowing developer Paul Haddad to choose which
OS he would make the minimum requirement. Tweetbot for iPad launched with iOS 5 — the latest major version — required.

“iOS 5.0 works on all the iPads, there’s not much of a reason to support older iOS versions,” sayd Haddad. “There’s a few people who are still running iOS 4.3 on iPad but that number is minuscule compared to the folks who have upgraded. It makes very little sense to spend the development effort support 4.x on iPads.”

The gamble paid off too, with the app reaching #1 on Apple’s top iPad Apps chart and Haddad says that “we’ve gotten two people complaining about it, so it was a pretty big win.”

*I know it’s in alphabetical order, but that’s not very intuitive when they are listed in a seemingly random order throughout the net.