Marco.org

I get a lot of good feedback from developers who say these posts are helpful, so I don’t feel bad spamming everyone with updates every few months.

Here’s my most recent data from people using the Instapaper app:

Compared to August’s data, you can see a few unsurprising trends:

• iOS 5 adoption is gradually rising, but it’s too early to require it. (It’s only 49 days old.)
• iOS 4+ adoption, now at 98.8%, is so ubiquitous that it’s very safe to require it.¹

• Developers of CPU-intensive iPhone apps and games can celebrate the continued infiltration of faster hardware, with at-least-3GS-class CPUs in 94.39% of iPhones and iPod Touches. Apps that need high performance can probably start requiring iOS 4.3 (87.8%) to forcefully cut support for the much slower old CPU in the iPhone 1, iPhone 3G, and 1-2G iPod Touches.

  With iPads included, 3GS-or-better CPUs are in 97.4%, A4-or-better CPUs are in 89.4%, and A5 CPUs are in 36.4% of devices in this sample.

We can also extract a bit of insight into Apple’s device sales:

• The iPhone 4S has sold well so far, especially given that it’s only been out for 47 days.
• iPad 2 sales have been steady, but seemingly not mind-blowing. We’ll see what happens after the holidays: last year, I saw a huge rise in iPad sales on Christmas and the following few days.
• Still, very few iPad 2 buyers choose the Verizon 3G model. (I did, but I wish I got the GSM version.)