iOS 7.1 Reaches 12% Adoption Rate In 45 Hours
A few days ago Apple released the long expected first major update to? the seventh iteration of iOS, iOS 7.1. It introduces many changes and even the CarPlay feature: CarPlay is basically the iOS experience designed for your car, connecting your iPhone to a CarPlay enabled vehicle. CarPlay supports Phone, Music, Maps, Messages, and 3rd party audio apps and it is controlled with Siri and the car?s touchscreen, knobs, and buttons. Siri was also updated with more natural sounding male and female voices for Mandarin Chinese, UK English, Australian English, and Japanese and the ability to manually control when Siri listens by holding down the home button while you speak and releasing it when you?re done as an alternative to letting Siri automatically notice when you stop talking.
The iTunes Radio and the calendar have also been updated, and the update introduces more accessibility options, such as the bold font option that now includes the keyboard, calculator, and many icon glyphs, the Reduce Motion option now includes Weather, Messages, and multitasking user interface animations and there are new options to display button shapes, darken app colors, and reduce white point. There are also many user interface tweaks and other minor changes like a new Camera setting to automatically enable HDR for the iPhone 5s, iCloud Keychain support in additional countries, the fix of the infamous home screen crash bug, improved Touch ID recognition, improved performance on the iPhone 4, a fix for the display of Mail unread badge for numbers greater than 10,000, and many others.
The iOS 7.1 update was released this Monday and Chitika, a mobile analytics company, released a report the following day about the update’s adoption rate in North America (that is both the United States and Canada). Chitika reported that a day (24 hours) after the update was made available by Apple, “iOS 7.1 users generated 5.9% of total North American iOS Web traffic“. Another report made 45 hours (almost two days) after the release of the iOS 7.1 update, indicates that the adoption rate has doubled since the first 24 hours, with 12% of total North American iOS Web traffic. This is very similar to iOS 7.0.6’s adoption rate which was at 13.3% two days (48 hours) after its release.
The report was based on data from “tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian iOS based online ad impressions generated within the Chitika Ad Network from March 9 through March 11, 2014“. We do not know the exact sample size but we do know that out of those 12% iOS 7.1 users reported two days after its release, some of them were iOS registered developers using one of the previous beta versions and even Apple employees, so the actual percentage of new iOS 7.1 users is a bit lower, though it is very hard to estimate by how much.
Apple is one of the companies that almost always enjoys fast adoption rates for its mobile Operating System. For example, iOS 7 enjoyed an unbelievable adoption rate, while the recent iOS 7.0.6 update (which as we reported fixed? a security bug: a fix for SSL connection verification) generated a very similar adoption rate as iOS 7.1: 6% of total North American iOS Web traffic 24 hours after release and 13.3% two days (48 hours) after its release. All in all, iOS 7.x users overall generated more than 80% iOS Web traffic on average from March 9 through March 11, 2014.
This is an enormous adoption rate when compared to Android. The latest version of Google’s mobile Operating System, Android 4.4 KitKat, was released in November last year and its adoption rate isn’t even close to that of iOS 7.1. According to Google’s Android Developer Dashboard, Android 4.4 KitKat’s adoption rate is 2.5%. That is unexpectedly low for the latest major version of Android. Also, all three versions of Android Jelly Bean (which was released almost two years ago in July 2012) have an adoption rate of only 62%, much lower than the 80% adoption rate of all iOS 7 versions.
iOS 7.1 didn’t really help iOS 7 gain a higher percentage of iOS market share; iOS 7 increased its iOS market share from 82% to 83% in the last two weeks, with iOS 6’s market share dropping 1 percent from 15% to 14%. iOS 7’s market share did not change much, remaining around the 80% figure and Chitika believes we won’t see any drastic increase until iOS 8 will be released, with iOS 8 having a good chance of seeing adoption rates of over 80 percents. Another interesting fact is that the percentage of users using an iOS version earlier than iOS 6 remained the same, at 3 percents.
