The Minority Report

Dan Grigsby over at the Mobile Orchard asks this question today: when do you start building apps (for your iPhone) that rely on capabilities of the new iPhone 3.0 OS?

When do you start building apps that rely on capabilities in 3.0?

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At first blush, it looks like an easy question to answer: build for 2.X unless you need some of the fancy-pants features. Thing is, many of the standard-pants enhancements in 3.0 represent leaps forward that’ll impact building all but the most basic apps. The most obvious example of this is Core Data; most apps need data persistence and Core Data beats the pants off of using raw SQLite.
Widespread 3.0 Upgrade By T+30 Days?

Dan includes this cool graphic of iPhone OS adoption and upgrade rates from Mike F. on AdMob:

The thing that caught my attention today and I want to comment on is the difference in the names between “Core Data” and “SQLite”. Now I understand that Core Data is just a Cocoa API on top of SQLite but I think that developing for Core Data sounds so much cooler than developing for SQLite.

Names for things are important and while I know that Blu-Ray was technically superior to HD DVD, I still think that the name “Blu-Ray” was much cooler sounding and part of the reason why it won the HD DVD war.

Coming back to development for the iPhone OS, I have to say it’s a testament to Apples continued domination in this space that they can get as many users as they have to upgrade their platform as frequently as they can.

Apple is light years ahead of some of the other smartphone manufacturers in their ability to quickly push upgrades to their operating system. Many consumers have Smartphones running Windows Mobile or Symbian for example are running OS versions that are several years old.
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