Apple latest version of iOS, 5.1 was released to general public on 12th March, 2012. iOS 5.1 provided huge relief for many users in terms of stability and battery issues. But whats interesting to see is the number of users who upgraded their iPhone to 5.1 and the duration it took for it. David Smith, the developer of the app AudioBooks which typically records around 100 thousand downloads per weak says that iOS 5.1 took around just 15 days to hit a user base of around 61% which is equivalent to what the most used version of Android OS is currently.
Apple started providing OTA updates since its iOS 5.0 release which made users life easy to update their iPhones. According to David Smith he has observed a similar pattern of updating even when the release of iOS 5.0.1 happened.
There was another interesting comparison David made. When considering the users who are eligible for OTA update, which takes into account only the users having iOS 5.0 or above, nearly 80% of the users upgraded their iPhone to iOS 5.1 in a span of just 15 days which is quite incredible!
Well, how is this even relevant? Each and every update from Apple provides numerous number of fixes and stability improvements which makes it a lot useful for the user. Apart from that a higher adoption rate of a particular firmware means most users use a particular firmware. This makes the life of an application developer lot better, by testing the app on few versions only.
This isn’t the case with Android OS. The much anticipated ICS update which was first released around 6 months ago still sees and adoption rate of only 1.6% which proves how much the platform suffers from OS update issues. Having various users in various major firmware version means a developer has to make sure he tests his app for all these versions. The much hyped Google Nexus S which was supposed to get an update back in December 2011 also has no update to ICS yet!