“When iOS 8 rolled out last September, it was shaky. Updates came fairly quickly. One, 8.0.1, lasted barely an hour before Apple pulled it. You see, it nearly bricked an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus by making it impossible to make calls and use Touch ID. Apple got a torrent of negative publicity as a result about this, but only a small number of users were impacted,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “Some media pundits exaggerated the situation beyond belief. It’s not as if Google and Microsoft haven’t released broken updates. It also had little to do with any skepticism over Apple’s current management, since problems of this sort have occurred from time to time over the years.”
“Regardless, it was perceived that iOS 8’s issues resulted in fewer upgraders, with the migration rate falling somewhat behind iOS 7,” Steinberg writes. But, “as of this week, some 85% of those visiting the App Store, according to Apple’s stats, are using iOS 8. To be fair, people with older gear may not be as quick to visit the App Store, thus skewing the numbers and making them somewhat higher than the actual user base. At the same time, Mixpanel Trends, a mobile analytic firm, keeps a running total, and it’s exceeded 89%.”
“In contrast, the user base for the various versions of Android Lollipop is about 18%,” Steinberg writes. “Most Android users never see any OS updates, or if they do, they will appear months after the actual release. Google has a broken upgrade system. They promised some years back to do something to fix the problem, and nothing’s happened.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Success! Many of the remaining 10% are iPhone 4 and older iPhones, iPod Touch fourth generation and older and the original iPad. We’d bet that very few users (~5%) with iOS 8-capable devices have failed to upgrade and those are basically tech illiterates who’ve packed their devices full of photos and videos, who never back up or clean/maintain or even bother (or know how) to reboot their devices (but who often complain the loudest that their “iPhone doesn’t work right”).
Android is just a total joke. A toxic hellstew, indeed. A platform that can’t deliver timely security updates to the vast majority of saps who’ve shackled themselves with it is a broken platform.