Posted By Quentin Carnicelli on September 23rd, 2004

Just saw in a message on the MacOS X-dev mailing list that The Omni Group has put up a page showing various system statistics from their users. It’s available at http://update.omnigroup.com/.

For Rogue Amoeba, the operating system statistic is the most interesting and important. Being able to use 10.3-only or 10.4-only technologies, for example, can really change how product development progresses, as well as the feature set of a product. But you have to know that there are enough people with the new version to warrant it.

Before we started on Audio Hijack Pro 2 back in March, we had calculated a rough estimate of 25% 10.2 vs 75% 10.3, and decided to continue to support 10.2 for AHP2. We used Safari user-agent strings in our web site traffic to estimate that, which isn’t exactly the best data source, but was the only option we had. Now, OmniGroup Update stats is showing 7.5% 10.2 vs 92.5% 10.3. Their numbers are probably far more accurate then the Safari user-agent string trick, though 7.5% on Jaguar feels a bit low.

We don’t have an official policy on what we will or won’t support – it seems to be better to just call it as we see it. Given these numbers, our current thinking is that it makes sense that new products can safely be 10.3-only. Meanwhile, we’ll continue supporting 10.2 on existing products until their next major revisions (e.g. Audio Hijack Pro 3 or Nicecast 2).