iOS 4 Now Accounts For 50% Of All iPhone Traffic

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While software is a great thing that powers our hardware and actually makes these various devices usable, it is not perfect. With every software release, no matter how many protocols and preventive measures are take, comes a plethora of bugs. Due to the presence of these bugs software developers are forced to continuously push out updates that will take care of them. While this is a great thing for something like a web browser or instant messaging client, it gets a bit more complicated when it comes to an operating system.

For a tradicitional desktop computer, the process ofupdating is simple and if additional hardware is necessary then it is possible to just upgrade with things like more RAM and a faster processor or video card. However, the luxury of being able to open up your machine and pop some additional RAM in is not available on a mobile device. For instance, if you buy a device that has a certain version of a mobile operating system on it and then the software developers update the operating system to a point where your device can not run it, you are out of luck.

This leads to obvious problems with market segmentation as we’ve seen with Android where devices like the T-Mobile G1 are unable to run some of the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system leaving out some of the most highly sought after features.

With the iPhone, this problem is apparant as well but not as drastic as so few iOS enabled devices actually hit the market. However, according to a recent study done by Chitika, market segmentation is still present. As you can see from the above graph, about 50% of iPhone users have made the switch to iOS 4. However, there is still a good portion of users running the various version of iOS 3.

Unfortunately, this problem will most likely never be remedied so the only way to combat it is by buying a device knowing beforehand that it will eventually be outdated and eventually obsolete. But you already knew that anyways, right?