Three weeks after Apple released the latest flavor of its mobile operating system, adoption of iOS 8 has stalled at 47% of users — creeping up only one percentage point since September 21, the last time Cupertino reported the stat on its App Store Distribution page.
The latest figures, which measure adoption on October 5, report 47% of users using the prior iOS 7 flavor (vs 49% when Apple last reported this), and 6% on an earlier iteration of its mobile OS (vs 5% when last reported).
iOS 8 starting to roll out to users on September 17 but a series of bugs have dogged the release thus far, which may explain why adoption rates are no longer moving the needle.
Just prior to releasing iOS 8 Apple had also pulled its flagship HealthKit feature, which had been due to be there from launch, burning developers who had added HealthKit integration in the process because Apple also yanked their apps from the App Store at the last minute.
An early update to iOS 8 — 8.0.1 — was rushed out, touted as a fix for HealthKit, as well as various other bugs including a glitchy implementation of third party keyboards.
However this update ran into trouble, with some users complaining that 8.0.1 knocked out their cell service. Apple was forced to pull the update and provide instructions for users who had updated on how to roll back to iOS 8 so they could restore their phone signal.
Another quick fix followed — 8.0.2 — to patch the issues 8.0.1 was supposed to have addressed but do so without zapping cellular reception on iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices.
Given the various bugs and buggy patches it’s perhaps not surprising that additional users have not exactly been rushing to update to iOS 8. Waiting til the kinks are ironed out may look like a more sensible option to many.
iOS 8 also requires a large amount of free space on a device if the user wants to update wirelessly. (Plugging into a Mac or PC to do the update removes this requirement but is obviously less convenient. It also requires the user to own a computer — not a given in these mobile centric, ‘post-PC’ times.)
MacRumours, which noted Apple had updated its official iOS 8 adoption figures earlier, points out that Apple’s officially reported rate of adoption is similar to adoption data from Mixpanel. Adoption of iOS 8 vs iOS 7 also looks far slower, with Mixpanel recording the rate of adoption of last year’s flavor of iOS at almost 70% 20 days after release vs less than 50% for iOS 8.
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