Apple released iOS 8 on Wednesday, and iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners flocked to download the latest and greatest mobile OS for their devices. The Guardian reports this caused Internet traffic in the UK to surge by as much as 60%. In spite of the increased traffic, iOS 8 adoption rate for the first day is lagging behind adoption for previous iOS debuts.
Data from LONAP shows that web traffic surged just as iOS 8 was released at 6:00 PM UK time. Traffic remained strong for several hours, with a peak at 8:00 PM in the UK as more than 70 gigabits per second were being transferred through LONAP’s exchange.
While iOS 8 may have caused a spike in Internet traffic, its first day adoption by users is lagging when compared to previous rollouts. Analytics firm Mixpanel reports only 14% of the iOS devices it tracks are running iOS 8, and mobile marketing company Fiksu reports a similar slow adoption rate of iOS 8 versus previous releases.
Two factors could be at play here. First, Apple’s new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus handsets are due for release on Friday, with more than 4 million preorders already in place. Customers may be foregoing the update on their current device, since a new precious is on its way.
A second factor of the slower adoption rate for Apple’s latest and greatest iOS version may be the large amount of storage required by the over the air (OTA) iOS 8 update. While the actual file size for the OTA iOS 8 update came out to just over 1GB in size, it required 4.6GB of free space on an iPhone in order to install. That’s a huge amount of free space for users stuck with an 8GB or 16GB device. (Users can however, update their devices via iTunes, which doesn’t require as much free space to complete the update.)
