[UPDATE] iOS 8 adoption | 36 hours: 20% | 30 days: 50% | 5 months: 75% | WOW

By | 2015-01-27

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iOS 8 adoption reached 16% in only 24 hours after release! Adoption is running a little slower this time around. As of October 9, iOS 7 had dropped below 50% with iOS 8 reaching 46.5%. Interestingly, at 40 hours after launch, iOS 7 adoption was nearing 40%! As we pass the 5 month mark, iOS 8 has an astounding 75% adoption rate. Compare that to Android, which has a tendency to be more fragmented. The chart is for January ’15. To see detail on how Android version fragmentation has varied since 2009, click on the image.

Android_fragmentation_1501

The slower iOS 8 vs iOS 7 take up rate is most likely due to the degree that iOS 7 users have filled up their devices with apps, pictures, music and HD movies. The update requires quite a bit of available storage memory to download wirelessly. If you are in this group of people who want to upgrade but can’t spare the space, consider upgrading using iTunes. The memory requirements are dramatically less. I update all of my devices this way. Many are near full. I believe the iPad Mini I updated needed to have 600 MB free, so I deleted a big Microsoft app which I re-added later. Quick and easy No pictures, music or movies were affected, or lost during any of my updates.

Per a June ’14 article in Engadget, over 800 million Apple iOS devices have been sold. The quick math says that equates to over 200 million converts in only SEVENTY TWO HOURS. Nearly 400 million have been updated as of October 9! To put the scale of these upgrade numbers into perspective, I read recently that one plane can carry about 950,000 smart phones. 20-30 of those planes leave China daily. That means that up to 421 planes worth of iPhones have been upgraded to iOS 8. Obviously iPads are larger than iPhones, so it’s less than that, but the sheer scale of these numbers is staggering when you think about it.

Businesses and education customers are likely delaying a few days to ensure application compatibility. My company waited about a week to approve the update for use in our Mobile Device Management solution. I’m certified in Airwatch too if you are wondering about that. Suggestion for businesses – get a Mac OS X Mavericks or Yosemite server (a Mac Mini will do), set up the Caching server and perform the iOS and App updates via WiFi while connected to that network (as opposed to downloading it from Apple). That’s how I’m set up at home now.

Advice from a certified iOS expert: My iPhone 5s is done, so are my work iPad Air and kids’ iPad Mini. The iPad Mini locked up during the update and I had to initiate a factory reset using iTunes to recover it. This completely wipes the device. ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DEVICES BEFORE UPGRADING. This applies to any device, any operating system. Use whatever options are available to you. Getting back to my iPad Mini. I had just performed an encrypted backup, so when I did the factory reset and restored the backup I lost nothing. Always use encrypted backups in iOS. When you do this, and restore to the same device, all of the usernames and passwords are recovered too. If you want details, feel free to ask. Like I said, I’m certified in these topics and am happy to assist.

Not to be too reiterative, but PLEASE use iCloud backup or iTunes backup for your iOS devices!

iOS 8 has some seriously beneficial new features. I’ll post some feature updates to my iPad / iPhone tips and tricks and a comparison of iOS 7 to iOS 8 shortly. All good stuff!

Chart Source: iOS 8 adoption – live feed – Mixpanel Trends – Mixpanel | Mobile Analytics

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