Tuesday 10 December 2013

Apple: iOS 7 now on 74 percent of iOS devices

A new report posted by Apple itself on its iOS developer portal says that, less than three months after its debut, iOS 7 is now on 74 percent of all the company's mobile devices -- an astonishing adoption rate unrivalled in the industry. Users still on iOS 6 make up about 22 percent of the base, meaning 96 percent of iOS users are running OS versions no more than a year old. By comparison, only around half of Android users are on a 4.x version (first released in mid-2012), with only 1.1 percent on the latest iteration.


The difference is crucially important to both app developers and customers: for the latter, being able to run the latest operating system version means more features and better security, increasing the value and safety of the device. For developers, not having to maintain multiple versions that run on a wide variety of hardware makes both development and support much easier -- part of the reason why iOS developers make an average of five times the revenue of Android-only app makers.

Apple's iOS 7 runs on hardware that is up to five years old, though some features are not supported on older hardware. For example, voice assistant Siri is not compatible with the only-recently-discontinued iPhone 4, though it does work with 2011's iPhone 4S. Figures from market analyst MixPanel actually report an even higher penetration than Apple itself, with the company saying that nearly 80 percent of its monitored users are on iOS 7, with 17 percent on iOS 6 and just three percent using anything older than that.

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