Apple updates it’s OS more often than any other mobile OS company, Apple has been known to lord this over Android, who have always been slow to release new iterations of the Google OS. This isn’t likely to change, what may change however is people’s perception of whether this is a good thing or not. Current uptake suggests Apple might have a growing problem on its hands with iOS 8 adoption.
As seen in Apple’s own statistics, fewer than half of its users are running iOS 8, nearly three weeks after launch. In fairness though not even a quarter of Android users are running the months-old latest version of KitKat, but when compared to previous rollouts of new versions of iOS, it doesn’t paint a promising picture.
At the same point last year, iOS 7 had hit nearly 70 per cent adoption. So a way behind on this one, whats worse though is that after the initial burst of users switching or buying the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, uptake has almost stopped. The amount of users converting to iOS8 has gone from 46% on the 21st of September to 47% as of yesterday.
There is no definitive causes to attribute this too, but anyone who has an iPhone or knows someone with one or even just looked on a forum lately will know some of the gripes: iOS 8 needs nearly 6GB of free space to install, which for most people meant a pretty ruthless deleting session removing large chunks of photos or a music collection just to be able to upgrade. Then, there’s the fact that 8.0.1 killed a lot of phones reception for iPhone 6 owners. Then there’s a seemingly above-average number of buggy apps on iOS 8, so you can forgive someone for wanting to put the update off.
This is the last thing Apple needs right now. It’s already made life slightly harder for developers, now that there’s four distinct screen sizes that need supporting just within the iPhone range, if we all run different versions of their iOS aswell it going to make it harder again.