iOS 9 Achieves 61 Percent Adoption Rate Among iOS Users

When Apple first released iOS 9, the latest version of its iOS mobile operating system, a month ago, its adoption rate enjoyed an initial spike, but has since steadied recently. As of this week, iOS 9 is now on 61 percent of all mobile devices powered by the iOS platform, which include iPhones and iPad tablets, this is according to the company’s App Store Distribution web page. 61 percent is certainly an improvement on the 57 percent adoption rate enjoyed by iOS 9 on October 5th.

iOS made its official public debut on September 16th of this year, and it achieved an adoption rate of over 50 percent in just a span of four days. Apple, of course, did not hesitate to declare this feat the fastest adoption rate every by an iOS version. And as mentioned earlier, that adoption rate has since levelled off, as Apple has encountered several technical flaws that needed to be fixed. This is hardly surprising -- any new iOS version is bound to stabilize its adoption rate weeks after its initial release. The same thing happened to iOS 8, which was plagued with a number of technical issues. iOS 9, the latest version, is similarly going through its own kinks right now.

So far, Apple has already rolled out a couple of bug fixing updates for iOS 9, specifically the iOS 9.0.1 and the iOS 9.0.2 updates. Some of the technical flaws still persist until today. But the good news is that since October 12th of this year, developers have been busy testing the fifth beta build of iOS 9.1, which should hopefully put an end to the persistent technical issues.

As far as adoption rate is concerned, iOS 9 has a better performance compared to its predecessor, iOS 8, at least according to Apple’s own numbers. When iOS 8 was launched in September 17th of last year, it managed to post a 46 percent adoption rate within the subsequent four days. However, after that initial spike, the adoption rate slowed down quickly. As a matter of fact, it took iOS 8 about a month in order achieve an adoption rate that is more than 50 percent, reaching 52 percent by October 20th of last year.

When measuring the adoption rate of versions of its iOS system, Apple includes mobile devices that upgrade to iOS 9 plus new handsets that come preinstalled with the newest iOS version. Another third party analytics firm, Mixpanel, measures adoption rate via actual mobile app usage, and it gave iOS 9 an adoption rate of 64.7 percent. Fiksui, yet another third party analytics firm, gave iOS 9 an adoption rate of 61.6 percent, right at par with Apple’s numbers.