iOS 6.1 was released to the public just a few days ago. While the update wasn’t a huge leap forward, support for new international LTE carriers and movie ticket purchasing via Siri comes to mind, it has already been installed on a significant percentage of active iOS devices.
Onswipe, creators of touch templates for web-based content, have seen adoption of iOS 6.1 rise quickly, from 11.35 percent within the first 24 hours, to 16.92 percent this morning, and up to an impressive 21.81 percent as of 3 PM ET today. (January 30th)
Onswipe gathers its data from over 13 million active iOS users. The number of active users alone has shown considerable growth, as it was “only” 10 million users last month. All those users means it’s a pretty substantial pool to draw stats from.
When Apple released iOS 6, it took a week for 44.8% of users to get on board. iOS 6.1 is at 22% in just a few days, and it looks like the momentum will only continue.
Why the quick adoption of iOS 6.1? According to Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste, it’s probably due to the fact that Apple’s over-the-air update mechanism has been out in the wild for a while now (it’s been available since iOS 5 was released in October, 2011), so users have had time to get comfortable with it and know more or less how the process works.
The almost immediate upgrade numbers are welcome news to developers, as they can create experiences that will be the same for a larger number of users at once, without having to take into account various iOS versions with their different quirks. Android, by comparison, has just 10% of its users running Jelly Bean, the latest version of that operating system. Jelly Bean was released in July 2012.
