The latest official iOS 8 adoption stat comes courtesy of Apple, which has added a note to its App Store Distribution page for developers revealing that the proportion of users that had updated to iOS 8, as of September 21, stood at 46% vs 49% using the prior iOS 7 flavor, and 5% on an earlier iteration of its mobile OS.
iClarified, which spotted the figures, notes that prior to iOS 8 starting to roll out to users on September 17, Apple was reporting the proportion of users on iOS 7 at over 90%.
Cupertino released iOS 8 to its developer community back in June, at its WWDC event.
Last week, figures from multiple usage trackers suggested adoption of Apple’s latest mobile OS was off to a slower start than its last flagship update, which ushered in a major visual overhaul of the platform. Mixpanel and Appsee reported an adoption rate of between 16 and 17 per cent within the first 24 hours of iOS 8 rolling out — which is around half the prior year’s rate for iOS 7.
One factor that may have held back an immediate spike of adoption is Apple requiring users to have a large proportion of free space on their device to do an over the air update to iOS 8. Tethering to a computer during the update process circumvented this requirement.
Apple also implemented a queuing system for the update — presumably in an attempt to manage what has often, in previous years, been a frustratingly opaque experience. That system may have helped regulate the update rate.
Regardless of the size of the short term adoption spike, an iOS 8 adoption rate that’s approaching half of the user-base in under a week is impressive. It’s certainly far faster than the rate of adoption for users of Google’s Android platform. The latest Android flavour, KitKat, took nine months to attain 40 percent market share, according to Mixpanel.
