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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T06:33:46+00:00

my question is simple i think. I am creating a really simple app which

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my question is simple i think. I am creating a really simple app which doesnt use any of the fancy new things from ios 5.
Yet programming ios 5 app seems a bit easier since memory management can be set to automatic.
There is no problem for me getting the SDK, i have both and both simulators. Its merely a question of future advancement of my programming and the app.
If i recall correctly, i read somewhere that almost 40% of iphones run ios5 and most of ipads run on ios 5 too. So i shouldnt be loosing much potentional customers / downloaders due to it, should i? Anyway the automatic memory management feels wrong. Like something i shouldnt use.. What is not right to do..

My question is, should i develop for ios 4 or ios 5?
I welcome everyones personal opinion.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think as most of the users do upgrade the iOS version to 5.0 as this is major iOS version and has many of the new features.

    So basically I would recommend that you use iOS 5 for development and still can make the application compatible to iOS 4 users.

    Also it is always better to work on the latest version of iOS in development phase, just to make sure you don’t leave many changes in update phase.

    As we know Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) which is a very nice feature in iOS 5 which does almost all garbage collection work in objective-C code.

    But still ARC apps do run perfectly fine in iOS 4 as well.

    ARC is supported in iOS 4 as well. So I don’t think that should be an issue as far as developing an app is iOS 5 with backward compatibility to version iOS 4 is concerned.

    Example : Also, in case where suppose you have a feature like Twitter which is in-built and easy to integrate in iOS 5, you can still check the device iOS version conditionally and still make it work in iOS 4 like:

    if([[[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion] floatValue]>=5.0f)
{
    // Integrate Twitter using in-built Twitter classes in iOS 5.
}
else if([[[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion] floatValue]<5.0f && [[[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion] floatValue]>4.0f)
{
    // Integrate the Twitter SDK as we did in iOS 4.0 and make it work.
}

    Let me know if you need more help.

    Hope this helps.

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