Apple has released figures on the number of iOS 17 installations and it appears that iOS 17 is less popular than iOS 16. iPhoned makes a guess as to what that might be.
iOS 17 less popular than iOS 16
Last Monday Apple announced that iOS 17 is now installed on 76 percent of iPhones released over the past four years. This shows that iOS 17 is less popular than its predecessor. This is the first time that Apple has announced such figures about iOS 17 since the operating system was released in September last year.
It turns out that 20 percent of iPhones released in the past four years are still running iOS 16 and four percent are running an even older operating system. Of all active iPhones, 66 percent run on iOS 17, 23 percent on iOS 16 and 11 percent on an older version of iOS.
There are also figures about iPadOS
Apple also shared iPadOS installation numbers. 61 percent of iPads introduced in the past four years have iPadOS 17 installed. iPadOS 16 is installed at 29 percent and an earlier version of iPaOS is installed at 10 percent.
Of all active iPads, 53 percent currently have iPadOS 17 installed. 29 percent have iPadOS 16 and 18 percent have an earlier version of the iPadOS software.
iPadOS 17 more popular than iOS 17
This time last year, iOS 16 was installed on 81 percent of all iPhones introduced in the last four years. We can therefore conclude that iOS 17 is still less popular than iOS 16. In February 2023, iPadOS 16 was installed on only 53 percent of iPads. The adoption of iPadOS 17 is therefore faster than the adoption of iPadOS 16.
iOS 17 was first released in September and Apple has released three major updates so far. A fourth major update, iOS 17.4, is expected in March.
This is why iOS 17 is less popular
The reason that iOS 17 is less popular than iOS 16 is that it initially contained relatively many bugs. These were subsequently resolved through new updates, but people often prefer to wait until a version without bugs is available.
Another reason is that Apple is required to allow sideloading. This is expected to be added with the iOS 17.4 update, so there are people waiting for that. Furthermore, the iPhone 8 and iPhone X have not received support for iOS 17. People with those iPhones may want to update, but simply cannot. In that respect you cannot say that iOS 17 is less popular.
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