iOS 9 Uptake On a Par With 8, Much Slower Than 7
- Friday, September 18th, 2015
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App monetisation firm Tapjoy has been looking at the uptake of Apple’s latest operating system, iOS 9, after its launch on Wednesday.
Tapjoy stopped the clock 18 hours after iOS 9 became available to see how quickly Apple users were switching to it. It found that consumers are adopting iOS 9 at a similar pace to iOS 8, though slightly slower. Based on Tapjoy’s network-wide data, which has a reach of over 200m unique iOS consumers per month, iOS 9 is on par with iOS 8, yet drastically behind the adoption curve for iOS 7. The chart to the left shows the adoption of each of the last 3 iOS versions.
Another interesting insight from the first 18 hours was to look at which device types are being updated the fastest. Typically iPhone devices are updated faster than iPads or iPod touches, and that is holding up with iOS 9. Even with some of the more anticipated features of this release designed specifically for iPad, iPad users have been historically slow to install a new OS after initial availability.
At the start of the day on Wednesday, 76 per cent of iPad owners were using iOS 8 and 15 per cent were still using iOS 7. 18 hours after iOS 9 became available, only 4 per cent of iPad owners had upgraded to it, compared to 6 per cent of iPod and 7 per cent of iPhone owners. Interestingly, while 64 per cent of iPod users were on iOS 8, 21 per cent were still on iOS 6 – three OSs out of date. 
Looking at adoption by geographic region, Japan and S. Korea led the way on 9.52 per cent and 9.29 per cent respectively, 18 hours after the iOS 9 launch, with China, Italy and the UK occupying the next three places.
This slow adoption rate underscores the trending rule of thumb for upgrading to a new mobile operating system, Tapjoy believes. Unless there are must-have, device-changing features in the OS, most consumers will wait a little while for early, annoying bugs to be stamped out, and then upgrade once the OS has been more refined.
The company concludes by saying that while it may be too early to tell whether fans will fully embrace the changes made in iOS 9, its network data indicates that iOS 9 will take a bit longer to embrace for the vast majority of Apple’s user base.
