Once more Apple has posted the adoption rate of iOS 9 throughout the iOS ecosystem on the App Store developer webpage. Measured on November 30 2015, iOS 9 has a seventy percent share, iOS 8 on twenty-two percent, and everything earlier is in the final eight percent slice.
Apple's numbers match up with that of independent analyst Mixpanel. Its data put iOS 9 on 77.95%, iOS 8 on 17.13% and others on 4.92%. Naturally Mixpanel is using a different methodology to Apple - the former is based on analysis of real-time analytics data gathered from installed applications in the iOS ecosystem, while Apple has the more loosely defined 'measured by the App Store on November 30th'.
Mixpanel iOS share (mix anel.com)
Nevertheless the trend on the iOS 9 uptake is clear. Across Apple's mobile platform, 2015's version of the operating system is keeping pace with the release of 2013's iOS 7, and outpacing 2014's iOS 8 - albeit iOS 8 had to rollback a point update (iOS 8.0.1) because of some show-stopping bugs that necessitated a pause to the process.
That's not to say that iOS 9 has had a smooth launch. It has seen a higher than average number of point release updates to the OS to catch numerous bug, but those releases have introduced more bugs into the OS, requiring more updates.
Thankfully Apple is able to roll out changes to iOS in short order and have them adopted by users (as the numbers here show). That's a better situation than Google, which continues to have to deal with the systemic flaws in Android and its inability to force changes to the core Android experience. Even with the bugs, issues, and multiple updates, I'll take iOS's ability to be updated quickly over Android's fragmented system of hope.
(Now read how Apple can capture one hundred percent of the world's smartphone profits).
