Category Archives: Adoption

Operating system user bases

Related: two previous posts on the patterns in Android adoption rates (December 2013, March 2014), a post contrasting iOS and Android adoption patterns, and a post from last month on iOS 9 adoption.

Both Apple and Google have just updated their mobile OS user stats, while Microsoft shared a new number for Windows 10 adoption at its event this week, giving us a rare opportunity to make some comparisons between these major operating systems at a single point in time. We now have the following stats straight from the sources:

  • The stats provided by both Apple and Google on their developer sites with regard to the user distribution across their mobile operating systems (Android and iOS)
  • The 110 million Windows 10 number provided by Microsoft this week
  • The 1.4 billion total active Android user base number provided by Google at its event last week
  • Total Windows users of around 1.5 billion, as reported by Microsoft several times at recent events.

In addition, there are various third party sources for additional data, including NetMarketShare and its estimate of the usage of other versions of Windows. Lastly, I have estimated that there are roughly 500 million iPhones in use now, and around 775 million iOS devices in use in total (including iPads and iPod Touches).

If we take all these data sets together, it’s possible to arrive at a reasonably good estimate for the actual global user bases of major operating system versions at the present time. The chart below shows the result of this analysis:User bases all iOSThere are several things worth noting here:

  • Each company has one entry in the top three, with Microsoft first, Google second, and Apple third.
  • However, only one of these entrants is the latest version of that company’s operating system (iOS 9), while the other two are the third most recent versions (Windows 7 and Android KitKat).
  • Google has three of the top six operating systems, none of which is its latest operating system (Marshmallow, released this past week). Even its second most recent version (Lollipop), now available for a year, is only the third most adopted version after KitKat and Jelly Bean.
  • Both iOS 9 and iOS 8 and the three most used versions of Android beat out every version of Windows but Windows 7.
  • The most recent versions of the three companies’ major operating systems are used by a little over 400 million (iOS 9), 110 million (Windows 10), and a negligible number (Android Marshmallow) respectively.
  • The second most recent versions are used by around 330 million (Android Lollipop), around 250 million (iOS 8), and around 200 million (Windows 8) respectively.

There are lots more data points to tease out here, but to my mind it’s a striking illustration of the differences in the size and adoption rates of these three major operating systems.

Two additional thoughts

Just for interest, I’m including a couple of additional thoughts below.

First off, here’s the same chart, but with iOS reduced to just the iPhone base. The order changes a fair amount, but iOS 8 and iOS 9 still make a good showing:

User bases based on iPhone onlyLastly, I wanted to revisit my post from a couple of weeks ago about the initial adoption of iOS 9, especially as it relates to Mixpanel’s data. In that post, I showed how Mixpanel’s iOS adoption data tends to be pretty close to Apple’s own data except for the month or so after a new version of iOS ships, when it tends to skew way lower than Apple’s own data. Now that we’re a few weeks on from the initial launch, and Apple has released the second set of iOS adoption data since the launch, I wanted to revisit that pattern. Interestingly, the very same pattern is playing out again – despite the initial significant discrepancy, Mixpanel’s data is now once again very close to Apple’s own:Mixpanel iOS data October 2015

iOS 9 adoption and Mixpanel

Related: Apple Topic Page, and a previous post on iOS and Android adoption patterns, as well as two earlier posts (1, 2) on Android versions in use.

Last week, following the release of iOS 9 by Apple, Mixpanel (along with other analytics firms) began releasing data relating to the pace of adoption of iOS 9. That data suggested that iOS 9 was being adopted more rapidly than iOS 8, and also that it had reached around 30% by the end of the day on Saturday. Then, this morning, Apple issued a press release about the new iPhones, but in passing noted that iOS 9 was now on more than 50% of devices, based on data from Saturday, September 19th. That’s a fairly sizable discrepancy, and it made me want to dig into the numbers to understand what was going  on.

Note: I’ve reached out to both Mixpanel and Apple about this, and I will update this post as warranted once I hear back from them. As of right now, the analysis below doesn’t include any additional information from them beyond what they’ve put out publicly.

A word on methodologies

It’s worth starting with a quick statement of methodologies. Apple’s goal is to give developers a sense of the operating system versions their target audience is using, and so is based on devices hitting the iOS App Store (Google, incidentally, does the same thing). It generally seems to pick a specific single day, usually a Monday, and measures which versions of iOS those devices hitting the App Store are using.

Mixpanel, on the other hand, provides analytics to app developers to help them understand engagement around their apps, but in the process also collects lots of data on which operating systems the users of those apps are running. As with any analytics software of this kind, the picture will always be incomplete, but the bigger the base of devices, the more likely it is to be representative, and Mixpanel’s is fairly big at this point.

Mixpanel is generally very close from October to August

With that note on methodologies as context, the first thing to note is that Mixpanel is generally very good at approximating Apple’s own numbers for iOS adoption, even though their methodologies are different. For the period from October 2014 to August 2015, Mixpanel’s numbers generally tracked within about 4% of Apple’s own numbers for iOS 7 and iOS 8 adoption. Interestingly, Mixpanel tends to estimate higher usage for the latest version and lower usage for previous versions than Apple.

September seems to be more of a problem

However, even though Mixpanel’s data tracks closely to Apple’s for most of the year, it tends to be quite a bit off the mark in September, immediately after the release of new iOS versions, at least for the last two years. The chart below shows the difference between Apple and Mixpanel’s adoption rates for iOS 7, 8, and 9. Negative numbers mean that Mixpanel’s rate is lower than Apple’s, while positive percentages mean Mixpanel’s numbers are higher.Mixpanel and Apple iOS adoption rate differencesThe chart shows several things that are worth noting:

  • As I mentioned, the margin of “error” (I’ll explain the quote marks later) is generally under 5%, though as you can see it grows steadily from late October 2014 to September 2015
  • However, the discrepancy between the two figures is much more significant for two dates – September 21, 2014, and September 19, 2015 – which happen to be the dates immediately after the launches of the new versions for the last two years. In both cases, Mixpanel’s adoption rate for the new version of iOS was far lower than Apple’s, in contrast to the usual pattern during the year.
  • The discrepancy quickly shrank last year – by early October the two numbers were very close again. We don’t know yet what will happen this year, of course.

What explains the September discrepancy?

I’ve carefully avoided describing Mixpanel’s data as faulty above – I did use the term margin of error once, but carefully put “error” in quotation marks. And that’s because even Apple’s own numbers aren’t necessarily accurate in reflecting the devices actually in use. For the sake of developers, knowing what mix of devices hit the App Store is of course actually more important and relevant than knowing the total mix of devices out there. But it’s not necessarily an accurate picture of what people are using across the broad base of devices. Mixpanel’s data may actually be more representative of the actual base of devices in use, but there’s no way to know for sure; ultimately, it is also measuring something other than true adoption rates across the base.

So, having framed this as a discrepancy or difference rather than an error, what explains why the numbers are so close from October to August, and yet so far apart immediately after a new iOS version launches? Here are a few possibilities:

  • Apple’s numbers, which reflect App Store visits, are unduly skewed early on by the influx of recent updaters looking for apps that take advantage of new features – e.g. content blockers, multitasking, and in-app search in iOS 9. Once the initial rush has subsided, App Store visitors return to looking more like the overall base. Since we don’t have detailed day-by-day data from Apple, it’s hard to tell how quickly this effect wears off, but I suspect it may be a big part of the answer.
  • It’s possible that Apple’s numbers, which are global in nature, are more representative of true trends than Mixpanel’s, which may skew towards (or away from) particular countries. As a result, if users in China or other major markets which Mixpanel may not track as closely update iOS more quickly, Apple’s numbers might capture that whereas Mixpanel’s wouldn’t. As download rates catch up in other regions, the discrepancy would work its way through over time. I don’t know enough about Mixpanel’s data to know how much of an issue this is, but it might be a secondary factor.
  • Apple’s regular iOS adoption data is usually captured on a Monday, whereas its post-launch data for the last two years was captured at the weekend (a Sunday last year, and a Saturday this year). It’s possible that the mix of devices in use – and especially those hitting the App Store – on the weekend is different from those in use on a Monday, but this is unlikely to account for much of the discrepancy, especially since the Mixpanel data was collected on the same day.

Another thing that’s worth noting is that other sources of iOS adoption data tend to agree more with Mixpanel at this point than with Apple’s numbers – both Fiksu and David Smith’s Audiobook app data tend to suggest adoption closer to Mixpanel’s than Apple’s, for example. So, either all these methods suffer from the same “problem” or Apple’s data is actually unrepresentative of the true base of devices out there, especially in these first few weeks. Until I hear more from either company, it’s going to be hard to know which is the case. But it’s certainly worth viewing Mixpanel’s data (and any other third-party data) in this context in the future, especially when it comes to the period immediately after a new version of iOS comes out.

Contrasting iOS and Android adoption patterns

I’ve done two previous posts (here and here) on Google’s Android developer dashboard stats, and I was surprised to find it’s been just over a year since my last one. I may still do a deeper dive revisiting some of the points from those previous posts, but this time around I wanted to do something different – contrast Android and iOS adoption patterns. Google has published data on Android version adoption for quite some time now, but Apple’s only been doing it for the last couple of years, so we have less data. But we still have enough from both platforms that we can draw some interesting conclusions.

iOS adoption – huge initial ramp plus slow conversion

The pattern for iOS adoption is very clear – a massive initial ramp in adoption in the first few days and weeks, followed by a steady conversion over time. The chart below shows the share of the base on each version in the first 24 months from launch:

iOS adoptionAs you can see, by the time the first month is over, more than 50% of the base is already on the new version, and it ramps to around 90-95% by a year later, just before the next version launches. At that point, it immediately drops to 25-30% as the new version takes over, and slowly dwindles from there down to under 10% after two years. There are differences in adoption rates for the various versions shown – as has been reported, iOS 8 has seen a slower initial adoption rate than iOS 7, though it’s now over 75%. Correspondingly, the share of iOS 7 has fallen slightly more slowly than iOS 6 did, though the gap in both cases has closed a bit recently. Continue reading

Updated Android version charts

Back in December I posted some thoughts on Google’s regularly updated Android developer dashboard, which provides data on the adoption of various flavors of Android as well as screen sizes and densities in use by devices hitting the Google Play store. As we now have several more months’ data to look at, I thought I’d update the charts from that post and revisit some of the trends I saw in evidence back then to see if they still hold.

Android versions in use

Here’s the overview of adoption rates for recent versions of Android, grouped by dessert name: Recent Android versions in use

Let’s test some of the observations I made last time around:

Major versions (i.e. those grouped together by dessert name) tend to take about 12-18 months from launch to hit their peak, usually at around 60-70% of the base

Continue reading

Thoughts on Google’s Android version charts

Google regularly updates the data it provides to developers on Android versions in use, screen sizes and screen densities, and I’ve been diving into this data today for a report I’m working on. In the next few days, Google will update the data again and there will no doubt be the usual flurry of blog posts and news items about Android fragmentation. But I wanted to share some thoughts that occurred to me as I looked through this data that go beyond the usual rhetoric. Some of these are original, some of them likely aren’t.

Firstly, a fairly predictable pattern has emerged in the adoption of the versions of Android, as follows (and as illustrated by the chart below) 1:

Android Major Version Distribution Continue reading

Notes:

  1. It’s worth noting that the methodology Google uses for all these numbers changed in April 2013, and now reflects only devices actively using the Google Play store, and not all devices as previously. From what I can tell, it hasn’t made an enormous difference, but has slightly increased the representation of newer versions while decreasing or eliminating the representation of older versions.