iOS 8 Adoption Is Much Slower Than iOS 7

All this chatter about iOS 8, and it seems everyone is slow to upgrade! Via several sources who track which OS is in use on their network, we find that iOS 8 is not yet widely used, and is seeing a slower uptake than iOS 6 or iOS 7 before it.Chitika, Mixpanel, Appsee, and Tapjoy are all networks who provide information about OS use based on their ad networks. Through charts they have provided, we see that iOS 8 is on a slow march to its eventual takeover. There could be a variety of reasons for this slow iOS 8 adoption rate, which we'll unceremoniously jump right into!

If I were trading up for an iPhone 6, I'd likely not worry about downloading iOS 8 onto my current iPhone. What's a few more days without it, anyway? By the time tomorrow rolls around, I'll be using it anyway, so there's no rush.

If you've read the reports on iOS 8 and older iStuff, you know it can be an issue. Both the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S are reportedly seeing major slowdowns with the update. With so much back-end stuff going on in iOS 8, it's pretty SoC consumptive.

Some users may be taking the "it'll get here when it gets here" approach this time around. Once they're prompted to update, they will. Until their phone or tablet makes them, they're cool with iOS 7.

The older version of iOS was a huge visual change, and had people at least curious to see what Apple was up to with their mobile OS. iOS 8 lacks the visual punch iOS 7 had, and users may not be so excited to see what's going on, because — well, there's isn't much to see.

If you're tethered to iTunes when you update, it's a pretty smooth transition. If you try to nudge iOS 8 onto your device over the air, your iPhone, iPod or iPad will demand a certain amount of breathing room. That's storage space many users don't have, and for the average consumer, might prove a befuddling roadblock.

Mixpanel CEO Susan Doshi tells TechCrunch that iOS 7 was at roughly 40% adoption in just 24 hours last year, compared with about 17% for iOS 8 in the same timeframe. Still, iOS 8 is well on pace.

Doshi says it took Android KitKat about nine months to see 40% via their service. The reasons detailed above also lend themselves to a slow uptick, naturally. iOS 8 asks that users back up and/or delete quite a bit for over-the-air updates, and we'd think that to be a major contributing factor to the blasé attitude users seem to have about updating.

Via: TechCrunch