A quick hack to measure iPhone OS distribution

I haven’t posted here in a while, since I have been so busy building new stuff. Some updates are expected soon (iPhone Layar anyone?)
Since most of the projects I’m working on involve iPhones in some way, I was interested in OS distribution on the iPhone platform: Is it still necessary to target OS 2.xx, or has 3.xx have enough uptake?

Since the iPhone sends it’s OS version in every web request it does, I decided to have a look at my own logfiles (in the hope that bigger apps will follow ).

I do realise this isn’t a scientific valid result: It’s just the distribution of one, quite recent, app. However, it does say something. So, without further ado, I present the results:

From this small sample, 4% didn’t already run 3.xx (it might help that this is an iPhone only app: iPod Touches apparently are updated less).

Since this is only taken from a small sample, I hope bigger apps will release their stats. Here is the small PHP code I used:

<?
define("LOGFILE","/home/panman/logs/prod.panman.nl_access_log");
$lines=file(LOGFILE);
foreach ($lines as $line){
if (!eregi("stufidates",$line)) {continue;}
//if ($i==0) {echo $line;}
    $parts=explode(" ",$line);
    if ($parts[12]!="(iPhone;"){
    $detects["noip"]++;
    } else {
        $os=$parts["17"];
        $detects[$os]++;
    }
    $i++;
}

echo "<table width=500>";
foreach ($detects as $key=>$hits){
echo "<tr><td>OS:</td><td>".$key."</td><td>".number_format(($hits/$i)*100)."%</td></tr>";
}
echo "</table>";
echo "Total:".$i;
?>

If you have an iphone app that does requests to your webserver, please run this code (or something similar, it’s just a first version) on your logs, and let me know the results.