[fpgeek]

Wow. The contrast with Android is stunning.

Google has been focused on enabling backwards compatibility since at least Android 1.5 (well before anyone knew how Android updates would play out in practice): http://android-developers.blogspot.sg/2009/04/backward-compa...

Meanwhile, Apple seems to prefer to make achieving backwards compatibility as hard as possible (short of explicitly banning it).

[wsc981]

OTOH when developing for Apple platforms there's not a huge loss when developing only for iOS 6+ (85% - 90% of users), whereas on Android you're pretty much required to target very outdated versions of Android as well. For example we target Android versions starting with Froyo.