Question

We’re building an application for OS X, and we can’t rely on our users all having upgraded to Snow Leopard, or whatever the latest version is. We want to make sure that as many people as possible can use our app, but we also don’t want to throw away some improvements that were made in OS X version if only 1% of users are stuck using earlier versions.

Is there anywhere I can find information on the proportions of people that are using each version of the OS? Or is there some “common wisdom” on the issue that real mac developers know?

We don’t need any superfancy graphics or 3d animation stuff, just plain old windowing APIs – but we’ve already run into one problem where “NSStreamDelegate” isn’t supported prior to snow leopard.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Web stats from Quantcast, late February 2010.

North American stats, but might serve as a guideline.

Version    %
10.6    27.3
10.5    52.1
10.4    17.2
Other    3.4

Omnigroup also provide some useful insight into updates to their installed base. You can click through to see breakdowns by major and minor versions on their site. For July 2010 they have:

Version    %
10.6    53.3
10.5    21.0
10.4    25.6
Other    0.1