I’ve installed the Windows 10 preview build on my laptop, and one side-effect of this is that I can’t get the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK bits to work (they won’t install). Hopefully they will be supported eventually in later (or the final) versions of Windows 10, but for now it means I can’t do any 7.1 builds of my phone apps using my laptop.

I thought it would be interesting to find out how many 7.1 users are still downloading the app, to gauge whether I should still try and support the older devices. I took a look at the download data for one of my apps (Aussie Toilets) for the last 3 months:

Graph showing percentage of Windows Phone OS versions. 7.1 at 13%, 8.0 at 33% and 8.1 at 53%

So, just over half of the downloads were using 8.1 and a third are still on 8.0. Only 13% are still on 7.1

What about handset manufacturers? No surprises there – Nokia with 90%.

Bar graph showing handset manufacturers by percentage. HTC with 8%, LG with 1%, Nokia with 90% and Samsung with 3%

And the same for country/region – Australia with 89%. I assume the other countries were just curious, international travellers or possibly even immigrants who preferred their original country’s settings.

Bar graph showing downloads by region. Australia with 83%, other countries all below 6%

And finally just out of interest, age groups:

Bar graph showing age groups. Reasonably even spread from 15 - 22% across age groups

That’s a nice even spread across the various age groups.

So that might mean that for now I’ll have to leave the 7.1 users high and dry. If support for installing the old SDK is fixed, then I can look at giving them a few more updates in the future. Alternatively I might be able to convert my old system image into a VHD file and then I can boot the laptop back into the old Windows 8.1 image. I’d have to trim down the VHD file so it can fit onto the 500GB SSD I’ve got in my laptop though (that may not be that easy as the original image that’s still sitting on the old non-SSD drive was also 500GB).

The other messy part is that you can’t easily develop within a single version of Visual Studio for Windows Phone 7.1, 8 and 8.1. Visual Studio 2012 was the last to support 7.1 and also supported 8.0. Visual Studio 2013 can do 8.0 and 8.1 and Universal Apps (sharing code with desktop Windows).