One of the few snippets of news from today's Apple earnings call was the latest adoption figure for iOS 7: by Apple's reckoning, 80 percent of all iOS devices are now running the latest version of its mobile operating system. About 17 percent of devices remain on iOS 6, while only three percent are using an older version.
Like the Android developer dashboard that is sometimes used to track Android usage, these iOS 7 numbers don't account for all iOS users, only the most active ones. Apple's figures measured App Store usage over a seven-day period ending on January 26, and anyone using a device that hasn't touched the App Store won't factor into these figures. Still, Apple is quick to point out that its active use numbers for iOS 7 far eclipse Google's for Android 4.4, which as of this writing accounts for only 1.4 percent of Android usage (the highest percentage belongs to Android 4.1, which was released in July of 2012 and has a 35.9 percent share).
It's unclear how many of those iOS 6 gadgets are actually capable of upgrading to iOS 7—the iPhone 3GS and fourth-generation iPod touch were both dropped from the iOS 7 support list after all. Active users who can upgrade to iOS 7 but haven't yet are likely to be holding off for a specific reason, and they may be hard to win over. While Apple said that 64 percent of users had upgraded to iOS 7 between September 18 and October 22, that number only increased to 74 percent by December 5. It's only gone up six percent since then. Some holdouts may be convinced by the upcoming iOS 7.1, which will be the operating system's first major update. iOS 7.1 is currently in its fourth developer beta and will be released in the coming months.
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