When it comes to almost everything Apple does (except for iPhone sales, of course) you could characterize the company’s approach as “Slow but steady wins the race.” That’s certainly what’s happened with iOS 8 adoption, which started out sluggishly, but has slowly continued to climb upwards in the months since.
According to Apple’s latest developer stats, a solid 77 percent of eligible iOS users are now upgraded to the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system: a not inconsiderable 5 percent rise from early February, when the company last shared its adoption figures.
Apple measured adoptions by visits to the App Store on March 16. As per those figures, 20 percent of users are sticking with iOS 7, while a tiny 3 percent are still using earlier iterations. Since those 3 percent stay the same month in and month out, it is one-fifth of the iOS 7 users who have jumped to iOS 8 since Apple last posted its stats.
In the meantime, Apple has released iOS 8.2, and several iOS 8.3 betas — bringing 300 racially-diverse emoji and 7 new spoken languages for Siri. Of course, thanks to continued strong iPhone 6 and 6 Plus sales (on which iOS 8 comes pre-installed) the overall pie is growing, too, although Apple only shares percentages rather than unit numbers in its developer stats.
It’s definitely a hell of a lot better than Android is managing, with Google’s latest figures showing that adoption is split between KitKat and Jelly Bean — despite the fact that the latter first arrived in 2012 and was last given a spit-shine update in 2013. Android’s current version, Lollipop, shows up on just 3.3 percent of devices. It was released last November, only a couple of months after iOS 8.
