[conradev]

Developers writing new apps see two things:

- High adoption rate of iOS6

- Cool iOS6 APIs (Autolayout, UIKit attributed text, indexed subscripting, etc)

and they decide to write for iOS6 only. They could support iOS 5, but the work is not worth the reward with the adoption rate of iOS6 being as high as it is.

For developers with existing customers, it is a different story.

[aaronbrethorst]

Even if you're not explicitly taking advantage of new platform, supporting iOS 5 increases your testing burden. For an indie dev (or a pair of developers), this can be a significant burden for minimal payoff, given how few users are on older versions of iOS.

[interpol_p]

Indexed subscripting is available down to iOS 4.x I think — definitely available on iOS 5. It's a compiler technology, not related to the SDK.

[conradev]

No, declaring literals is a compiler technology that works with any SDK.

Subscripting requires runtime support in the form of `-[NSDictionary objectForKeyedSubscript:]` and pals , available only in iOS6 and above:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/cocoa/r...:

[interpol_p]

Thank you for the correction — I was thinking of ARC and weak references when I made that comment.

[conradev]

Actually, I stand corrected, indexed subscripting works back to iOS 5:

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#releasenotes/Object...