Right now, Apple is hosting their own developer’s conference at Moscone West. Their keynote is still ongoing, and while talking about iOS 9, there was a pretty interesting stat shared. iOS 8 is sitting at 83% adoption rate, which is actually lower than what iOS 7’s adoption rate was. They did indeed compare it to Android’s latest version which is Lollipop. Luckily, Apple didn’t throw the numbers to far out there, and did combine 5.0 along with 5.1. Which is about 12.4%. That’s right just 12.4% for an OS that launched last November. Now, yes Google has had plenty of issues with Android 5.x Lollipop, but that’s still a huge leg up that Apple has over Android. And that’s updates.
So why does Apple have such a higher adoption rate than Android? For one, Apple makes all their hardware. Making it easier to create software for their iOS devices. Google doesn’t make all their hardware. They have tons of partners who all make all kinds of devices with different hardware, and different software on top of Android. Which makes rolling out updates even tougher to do for Google. It’s long been an issue for the search giant, and they’ve tried many times to fix the word, fragmentation. Updates have gotten better, but not by much.
In fact, we are still seeing devices launching running Android 4.4 KitKat. Like the Huawei P8 Lite which just launched in the US last week. Meanwhile, Apple pushes out an update to all the iPhones and iPads out there all at once – unless it’s a really old model. They don’t even have to wait for the carriers to approve the updates, which we on Android know all to well. In fact, that’s why the Sony Xperia Z3 on T-Mobile waited so long for its Lollipop update compared to the unlocked models.
The Android Distribution numbers just came out a few days ago, which shows that KitKat has around 39% and about 12% on Lollipop. And about 36% on Jelly Bean. It’s about time that Gingerbread got out of the double digits for market share, right? It’s down to just 5.6%, still more than Ice Cream Sandwich at 5.1%.