iOS Version Stats | Hacker News Reader

iOS Version Stats

david-smith.org

132 pointsWoodenChair112 comments

I was amused to notice last week that Android 8 - which has been "available" (for not very large values of "available") since Aug 21, is showing less than 0.1% market share (on the Android dev dashboard), while iOS 11 which doesn't come out for another few days was already showing 0.2% of all iOS devices already...

Part of it is that android is used way more often, on very old hardware that is long discarded by apple users. Part of not (only) catering to the wealthy.

Average device age is more than 3 years. Average!

In my experience iPhone hardware doesn't get discarded but handed down to grandparents, children etc and continues to live a long life.

Do you have a source for your device age numbers or are you just making up stereotypes?

My experience too. I gave my 5s to a friend when I got my 6s, and she was overwhelmed and said it was the nicest phone she'd ever owned. That was 2 years ago and she has no intention of replacing it anytime soon as it still runs fine and will get iOS 11. My iPad 2 is still going strong. I don't have a single iOS device that wasn't used 4+ years by someone close to me, and I started with the 4s.

Yep. Every single iPhone I got continued its life in the possession of someone else.

Meanwhile my Nexus 7 is in a drawer with a cracked screen alongside the remains of the Nexus 4 that stopped retaining the SIM. Then there is a defunct Moto G that I washed.

Either Android gizmo toys are poor quality or a common use case for Android could be to use it until the gadget is dead. Perhaps Apple owners buy more shiny and have more perfectly usable gadgets to give away. Perhaps Apple users are more fashion conscious, wealthier and keener than Android users to have the latest features.

The used car market can be similar.

iPhone screens crack and smash just as much as any phone, if not more. I've cracked one, my wife's done 3. (!)

But you can almost always get them repaired for significantly less than the resale value of the phone, so it's worthwhile to do so.

If you look through the model breakdown about a quarter of those devices are 4 years old or more. Many of those are iPads, so it looks like iPads generally last longer than iPhones, supporting the theory that slowing iPad sales are partly due to long device lifespans.

Actually this may explain why more iPads are on older OS versions that iPhones - more of them are older devices with insufficient RAM to run recent OS versions.

So this data is strong evidence for the opposite of what you're saying. iOS devices have such long lifespans that they actually skew OS version adoption rates. You don't see that clearly for Android because even current devices on the market often come with several years old OS versions so you can't reliably infer released OS version from device recency as you can for iOS.

The reason is a staged rollout, they seem to start slow (probably to catch early issues then ramp up).

I was only offered the 8.0 on my Nexus 5X last Thursday. Whilst the release might have been a month earlier I think the gradual rollout is to help frontline help desks and App developers.

No it isn't. The reason is very few people have Nexus/Pixel phones and they're pretty much the only ones that can get 8.0.

7.1 is only installed on 1.6% of phones and that has been 'available' for nearly a year!!

For context, I have Samsung tablet at home, that is still being currently sold by the company as new. It is stuck on 4.4.4. They have "no plans" to issue an update, according to support.

Sure, Google run staggered rollouts for the Nexus/Pixel line, but all the other OEMs (Samsung, OnePlus, etc) take months to release their customized OS versions, if they ever do.

In addition, Android devices often have very short OS update support lifecycles (2 years seems to be common), while iOS 11 looks to be supporting as far back as the iPhone 5S (2013)

Why do they do staged rollouts instead of just releasing the OS for all ala iOS?

iOS rollouts are staged.

If by staged you mean that some people download the beta a couple months before the release date then yes. But on the release date iOS is released to all consumers with supported devices.

iOS updates are available for everyone at the same time, but Apple does stagger the update notifications. So users that know an update is available can go to Settings and find it immediately, but notifications go out in stages after the release.

Sure, but for the purposes of this discussion I think it's enough to say that Apple releases it all at once. Apple stages their updates over the course of hours, maybe a few days tops. The Android+Custom Skin sort of staging ends up spacing things out over months.

I never understood why Google's Nexus/Pixel security updates are staggered over weeks, leaving a lot of people vulnerable.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/123401/are-stag...

Stage rollout is usually done over hours and days, not months. Apple also uses staged rollouts but you'll usually get the notification within 12 hours after release.

Not with OS updates. Even Windows can take months to push major updates after availability. This isn't just to take the load off of Google's CDN (they could honestly handle all of the Nexus/Pixel owner's downloading a 1GB update the same day without noticing a blip on resource usage). They want to avoid some device-bricking or otherwise major bugs happening, which is easier with a slowly staged rollout. Impatient users can always install manually with minimal effort.

I'd love to run the latest Android, but my two year old phone can't run it. In fact, I'm stuck on 6.0. My iPad II (the second one) runs iOS9. Still runs fine for youtube, which is it's primary purpose.

When I finally retired my iPhone 4S after years, it could still run the latest iOS.

And more importantly than just features, the high rate of latest-OS-adoption on iOS means security updates get out fast.

This has a side effect of "herd immunity" in that iOS is a less-desireable platform to develop exploits for than Android, since the shelf life is much better for an android exploit.

I'd love to see google innovate here, for now it seems like they're not even trying to match Apple when it comes to this metric.

Have you not heard about Project Treble and the HAL separation efforts going on? Google is indeed trying to innovate here. With Android 8 at least, the situation should improve - it might take some additional enforcement through Play agreements and such to really get it locked down though.

The OEMs are still the ones expected to push updates....

For now, yes, but it opens up the possibility of changing that down the line or for users to manually perform those updates.

As we say in Portugal, better wait seated.

It's primarily the chipset vendor (i.e. Qualcomm, Nvidia, etc.) at fault for lack of updates, not the OEMs. Treble removes one more excuse for OEMs to hide behind. (Not to mention the infrastructure is now in place for Google to push device-agnostic system images directly.)

I don't belive it will change anything, unless Google actually forces them.

My brand new 2017 LG stuck on Android 6.0 kind of proves the point.

That won’t help with many kernel related issues or issues in the HAL drivers themselves, only userland.

Speaking of being amused, when I upgraded my devices to iOS 11 I noticed a lot of apps wouldn't work or install until the developer updated their app to iOS 11. I've never had this type of problem on an Android device.

This is possibly because iOS 11 completes the transition to 64-bit[1]. If they apps haven't seen updates in a while, they may still be 32-bit only, meaning they cannot run on iOS 11. We have a handful of apps in this position right now, but clients are reluctant to pay to have them updated.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/06/ios-11-32-bit-mac-app-store-6...

I've been hearing a lot about people not wanting to upgrade. My question is, putting aside the overhead of submitting to the App Store, writing release notes, etc. I thought that the only step that would actually be involved would be to recompile the app? Unless you have something like hand rolled modules of Assembly or inline functions, would it really be that difficult?

Fetching the project from archives (most of the time, just a git clone, but you have to find it), re-familiarizing with the project build process (do I need to fetch some assets that are not in git?), Xcode updating the project and breaking everything, having a gazillion of deprecated warning, code signing certificate have to be re-issued, the SDK you had is not available anymore so you have to update the APIs...

It can quickly take a day, a week... depending on the App.

Yeah, 3rd party SDKs are a problem for us. We've got a project waiting to go live, but one vendor won't give us an iOS11 "certified" SDK until 2 weeks after iOS11 ships... (And yeah, their current SDK crashes in iOS11... It's almost like they don't even know you can get access to iOS betas...)

For apps that are still 32-bit only, they have to be several years old. I believe the first version to support 64 bit was iOS 7 and at that point, I think Xcode would compile with universal support by default. Most of our affected apps were built for iOS 6 (or lower) and the clients have not wanted to pay to keep them up to date. As a result, an update at this point requires quite a bit of work because of deprecated and removed APIs preventing us from recompiling. Then you have the issue of third-party libraries that may not support 32 bit, so you have to go find updated version (if they exist. If they don't, you have to completely remove it and find a replacement)

You are correct, though, that in the best case, it is just a recompile.

32-bit app support has been removed. I'm guessing this will allow them to remove 32-bit support from future processors. It might already be gone in the A11 chip.

High Sierra will be the last version of macOS to support 32-bit apps, so this same transition will happen next year on the desktop.

More importantly, it means you don't need to ship 32-bit copies of system frameworks, and those 32-bit versions don't take up RAM just because 1 app needs to load them into the cache.

93% of iPhones are on the latest major OS version.

Compare this with the mess that is Android versioning.

There is a sizable cohort all the way back to 4.4, which significantly complicates app development and testing.

https://fossbytes.com/most-popular-android-versions-always-u...

When you’re managing a decent sized wireless network all the out of date Android devices are a right pain in the ass, so often I find devices that aren’t just out of date (usually Samsung’s) but also devices trying to connect to dodgy BitTorrent and P2P networks - furthermore when I speak to the user(s) involved 99% of the time they genuinely didn’t know their device is running dodgy software such as malware with P2P connections OR that it’s a potential security issue that they haven’t or often can update their OS. Most of the time the devices look quite modern too, it’s not like its people running really old devices.

Why P2P? Are they used as seedboxes? Isn't storage usually quite limited on older androids? Using them for P2P sounds unsual. Or is it just used to spread malware?

Isn't Popcorn Time using Bittorrent? I'm guessing it's apps not participating nicely in P2P networks.

I highly doubt anyone torrenting on their phone doesn't know what they're doing. It's not exactly a common malware C&C method, most likely users pirating stuff and playing dumb. Keep in mind, Android also has apps like Popcorn Time available fairly readily.

Heh

I have been writing Android apps for a long time and versioning has very rarely been a hard problem. The support lib makes sure that you have a unified API in front of you.

It can be a big bother for some very specific apps like a camera (I have never written one though, I can only say that camera 1 vs 2 looks painful from afar).

Most of the time you just access the APIs from the support lib facade and either :

-the support lib (re)implement for you.

-it fallbacks gracefully if something minor can't be backported

But if you wanted to use Java 8, which has been available since 2014, on Android you need to target at least Android 7.0, skipping out on 4.4-6 which is a huge market. On iOS however, you can use Swift on many more devices, even the latest version of Swift.

Don't forget that many apps from the ios app store stop working for old os and force you to either upgrade your os or you can't use the app.

I remember that back in ios 4 and 5 when Skype doesn't work and forces you to upgrade. Not sure if that's how many devs are or it was only Skype.

The difference with Android being that you can’t always update your OS. iOS 10 was supported on everything back to iPhone 5. That means iPhones 5, 5c, 5s, 6, 6s, SE, and 7. iPhone 5 was released back in September 2012; That’s literally 5 years ago.

I believe now the iOS App Store lets you download the latest version of the app that will still work on your phone (though I suppose for a service like Skype that still may not be helpful if the service provider cuts off access to older apps).

True to an extent - parts of J8 are available with lower API levels as well. But then there's Kotlin, which doesn't have these restrictions.

Anybody still starting new Android projects in Java has a pointy hairstyle or stopped having fun in programming a decade ago. I bet somebody will use the word "maturity" to scare people into not choosing Kotlin but it's really just a dev that slowly grew scared of learning new things.

Four downvotes yet no counterarguments. Because there are no arguments to use Java over Kotlin. Yet it hurts to read it for some?

How about because all you did was insult people who aren’t using your pet language?

I use Java 8 (not an Android developer). I think it’s a great language and I’m very familiar with it. I imagine it’s the same with many others.

Your post is basically the same as “LOL old-timer C++ people, if they’d just use Rust things would be fine”.

It’s not useful or constructive.

You see Kotlin is a drop-in replacement for Java. Just like VB.Net is a drop-in replacement for C# and vice versa. There is no scenario in the .Net world thinkable that cannot be solved with VB.Net. Yet nobody uses it, while there were droves of people that were very comfortable with VB long before C# even existed.

C# was on equal footing a better language than VB.Net and people started using that. Nobody can deny C# is just more productive. Even when the real differences between VB.Net and C# are much smaller than it seems. You as a Java developer must understand why a Java-like language like C# would be superior to a BASIC-derived language unless there were other factors in play.

Kotlin is proven better than Java, not forcing people to deal with nil all the time leads to safer and more terse code when used by an equally skilled programmer versus Java. It's the exact same position as VB.Net vs C#. And major vendors are backing it, just like C# got official support from Microsoft.

I can't judge C++ versus Rust. But Rust is not a drop-in replacement for C++ at all for what I understand about it.

You can use Kotlin on Android, which is way closer to Swift than Java 8.

There has been no clamor for Java 8 in the Android community. It is a fine update to Java 7 but Kotlin offers us so much more.

So we asked for Kotlin and that's what we got.

I don't understand how you can say that versioning isn't a hard problem when you've been developing for a long time. Every major release brings a host of changes, and every release, you have to litter your codebase with "if version > x do this else do this". There is utter chaos for the first few days while the development community not only orients around the OS changes, but also how every phone manufacturer has bungled the changes (Samsung, being the worst at this).

> Every major release brings a host of changes, and every release, you have to litter your codebase with "if version > x do this else do this".

I rarely, if ever, have needed to do this, and I've been working with Android since 2009. Most of the time that is abstracted away by the support libraries, anyway.

The version fragmentation generally isn't a huge issue for Android app developers, in practice.

Same thing here.

Yeah there are some `if (SDK_INT > x)` but I can't really say that the code is littered by those. I can spend weeks (maybe months) without having to make such a check.

We also have some OEMs specifc bugs that need addressing from time to time. Again, this is very annoying but not a 'significant' part of the effort.

WTF, 4.4 is even growing :D

> 4.4 is even growing

No it's not. The arrow is wrong. August 4.4 is 16%, September 4.4 is 15.1%.

Of iPhone 4S users, 85% have upgraded to the latest version available for the platform, iOS 9. There are 9% still using iOS 6. That's the largest percentage of users running a version that is not the latest. I'm one of them.

My reason for not updating is because I use iTunes 10.6.3, which has USB sync for contacts & calendars, and even PowerPC. I was using iOS 5.1.1 for a long time, until a broken Cydia package forced me to restore, and then I had to downgrade using OdysseusOTA.

Software rot is a daily problem. LINE is discontinuing support this week. It's like the software is forcing me to upgrade my hardware.

The day will come when my phone will break. Unless Apple dramatically changes course and brings back their ecosystem, that will probably be the day when I leave iOS altogether.

From what you describe they probably won’t miss you.

I don’t say that to be mean but you’re literally promoting what would be a regressive agenda as far as they (or hell, even Google) are concerned.

What are you going to change to? Android has software rot too, are you just going to rock an old 8210 for the rest of your days?

What about Apple's services and 3rd party apps? I remember upgrading things like Notes with warning that they'll be unusable on old operating systems. I agree with you that for old devices like iPhone 4S, iOS 6 was the most usable iOS. I'm using iPhone 4S and it's a huge pain with iOS 9, so I'm thinking about trying to downgrade it, but I'm worried about ecosystem.

That said, I played with new iPhones at store and they are quite fast even with latest iOS. I guess I'll finally upgrade to 8, I hope that it'll last longer than 4S which became obsolete just a two years after release, when iOS 7 was released.

How do you upgrade to 8 and not 9.3.5 (the latest one)?

There's some thing called Odysseus OTA. It required jailbreak and allows to downgrade to iOS 6. I'm not sure how to downgrade to iOS 8, may be it's not possible at all.

My old iPhone 6+ is still holding strong, though it's been demoted to a wifi-only game device for my daughter - I probably would have held onto it instead of upgrading to the 7+ but the GPU was a little on the anemic side to handle the upped screen resolution. On that same note though, my iPhone 7+ has been buttery smooth and considering the obscene amount of horsepower it has under the hood I can easily see me using it for 2-4 years (I'm skipping upgrading my phone for the first time in 7 years).

I'm using a 4S as well, but have stuck with iOS 7. I've been pretty happy with my "outdated" apps until recently, when Skype (whom I may for a subscription) told me I need to upgrade my app to continue using the service. Unfortunately, there is no update available for iOS 7... Shame.

Props to those companies that continue to support older iOS versions. Notably Spotify.

Spotify is basically a wrapped webapp, so that makes their life a little easier.

I know that is the case for the desktop apps (Electron I think), but is that also true of the mobile apps?

AFAIK all of it. Based on their talks anyhow

> It's like the software is forcing me to upgrade my hardware.

As former gamer, and someone that did Symbian/J2ME in the past, that was always like that for me

I have an (old?) iPad 2 still running iOS6. I don't use it a lot anymore, because updating generally slows down the device and it already is pretty slow.

However, Safari can't even load newspaper sites anymore, because Webkit is out of date so much. Hurray! Time to buy a new one I guess?

They're cheap nowadays and still have great mileage

Just replaced my kid's first gen Minis, which have iPad 2 internals, yesterday as it was my eldest's birthday. They still used them every day for Youtube, WeChat, Wattpad, Tapas (online web comics) and a few games.

They were still usable on iOS 8 but they were having increasing problems with apps crashing from time to time, probably due to running out of memory. Still, 5 years is a fairly good run.

I still have a iPad 2 with iOS6. Its battery lasts days, with the same duration for 6 years. All the old apps work fine.

Only some ad-ladden websites crash the browser from time to time - but the same is true for all 512MB memory devices incl Android phones/tablets.

The big mistake that many iPad 2-4 and iPad Mini 1 owners made was to upgrade to iOS7 (or newer) - well than it's game over, the UI speed degenerated a lot, and I know of no one of those early iOS7 upgraders that are still on their old device, many regretted "bricking" their device and bought a new device to replace the laggy thing.

ios9 runs fine on these. I have one, and the browser is adequate. Some sites do crash it. Generally things with 15,000 ads like the weather channel.

Youtube app is perfect though.

That's what makes me happy for iOS. As a developer I don't have to think more than 1 major version back and I am covered! Android is so much fragmented, teams have debates over supporting 4.4+ or 5+.

StatCounter have started to track iOS versions since June: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/ios/mobil...

There were a lot of ipad 2's sold that cannot upgrade beyond 9.x. It's a shame there is no way to get an upgraded web browsing component onto them to make them safer.

Just a hypothetical. Can Google say to all the phone manufacturers that you can only use play store services if you are not going to make any customizations and hence ensuring that the updates are not in the phone manufacturer's hands?

You're sort of describing Project Treble, which was just introduced in Android Oreo: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/android-8-0-oreo-tho...

Not really, because OEMs are still free to do their own customizations and they are the ones responsible for pushing updates.

http://androidbackstage.blogspot.de/2017/08/episode-75-proje...

Guess how many will push updates, even with Treble enabled devices?

Hopefully somewhat more?

It's likely a logical first step in a larger push to resolve the update issue on Android devices.

right, but how many logical first steps down this road has Google taken in the past...? This seems like the fourth or fifth.

Approximately zero - I mean, about the only things they've done is updating of play service stuff and some interesting malware detection techniques. They've (sadly) done almost nothing towards the goal of truly improving the update situation until now.

> They've (sadly) done almost nothing towards the goal of truly improving the update situation until now.

That's not entirely true. They attempted previously to do this via policy (Android Update Alliance), but that failed because it's too expensive for OEMs to update, which is what Treble is attempting to fix. And in the meantime over the past several years Google had taken a policy of backporting security fixes, which many OEMs are on board with and do roll out security fixes.

They only push security fixes for flagship devices.

This brand new LG is stuck on June patch level.

More than before. Sure, some manufacturers will prefer to update only their flagships, but that won't be a problem for long. Treble doesn't force OEMs to update - it simply makes updating take less time and resources of the OEM. Now that its cheap, some OEMs have the capability to update their entire stable of devices, incentivizing the other OEMs to follow suit. Of course, it'll take some time for this to materialize, but in the meanwhile, installing ROMs becomes much easier.

For me that is just plain wishful thinking until Google actually forces OEMs to update, or adopts the Microsoft way and pushes the updates itself.

Otherwise this will be yet another failed attempt.

What they're doing with Android 8 is making it so that the HAL is separate from the OS and the OS is then upgradable outside of the HAL. This should mostly resolve the issue, assuming they enforce it with the Play agreements.

Anyone else think that population count graphs would be more illuminating than percentage?

I hold off upgrading for fear of missing a jailbreak again.

Is there much benefit in jailbreaking these days besides the ability to run pirated apps?

I know people used to do it to get better notification mechanisms or things like control center but those are now built into the OS so the need isn’t as big.

I don't have a jailbreak but I wish I did for stuff like unlocked CarPlay mirroring (would let me use Waze), ability to hide apps I don't ever use, etc.

I wish there was something like WebOS's Preware for non-jailbroken phones

Don’t bother, there will never again be a public jailbreak. iOS exploits are just far too valuable: no one is going to publicly expose a jailbreak (which Apple would patch immediately anyway) when they could get hundreds of thousands of dollars by reporting it to Apple (or a million dollars from Zerodium). iOS jailbreaking is gone and not coming back.

What has changed?

Funny how you always hear about Android fragmentation (hard to avoid with so many vendors), but iOS is not exactly much better in the end for a company that controls everything from the hardware to the OS.

Looking at the numbers, iOS is significantly better in reducing version fragmentation. Like you said, it's much easier to do this when you don't have dozens of OEMs in the way.

Till iOS 11 you needed to update OS to update system apps it was not so in Android so despite all the talks of fragmentation most people are still able to update a lot of the stuff in Android without and actual an OS update.

Isn't the value add the user gets from updating their OS the benefit of security updates and features?

You're conveniently forgetting all kinds of hardware driver issues and bugs and fixes in newer kernels that Android users will never get. Even if AOSP and Google update, the vast majority of devices don't run AOSP nor are Nexus/Pixel devices. And not all (security) issues can be fixed without an OS update either.

Not having to update your OS is not necessarily a virtue. Considering Apple provides updates for a good 5 years, I'd hardly consider it a problem to have to update every now and then.

> ou're conveniently forgetting all kinds of hardware driver issues and bugs and fixes in newer kernels that Android users will never get.

This. THIS. I cannot believe the amount of people that completely and willingly needs to ignore the fact that the kernel will not receive CRITICAL updates. It's a pretty dirty game Google is playing by giving "security updates" all of the time while devices often can easily be rooted.

I hear this security issue all the time. But what kind of issues do the actual end users face because of it? Is it something not noticeable to the end-user? I have many relatives using old versions of android even i gave a 2.3version android to a cousin. But have not heard any security related issues. Comparing it against windows, virus related problems were many. I have known people in India who normally don't buy software buy anti-virus software.

How about the recent Bluetooth vulnerability BlueBorne that allows remote takeover of devices without any user interaction?

That’s a kernel level issue. A Play Store package update won’t fix it.

One of the relatives did get a message from Playstore to disable the bluetooth service.

So they can be vulnerable or slightly cripple their device until the patch (which I’d be willing to bet a huge number of devices never get) comes.

That’s not exactly a great spot for a user to be in.

From the people i know nobody keeps their bluettoh devises on for extended period of times. Its used usually to transfer images/videos. But it will be a hassle though.

What else are there which would affect users very hard?

It doesn’t matter if your connected to a device, simply having the radio on is all you need to be compromised. It’s a very serious vulnerability.

You mean Bluetooth on or any devices which has Bluetooth?

If Bluetooth is on, and the kernel isn’t patched, the device is vulnerable.

Doesn’t matter if Bluetooth is connected to something. Doesn’t matter if someone tricks you into connecting to a specific evil device.

Is Bluetooth enabled? You’re vulnerable.

It’s BAD.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/bluet...

Ok. If Bluetooth is off it's safe. Thanks for the info.

I’m sorry I don’t see any comparison at all, iOS is a /lot/ less fragmented and iOS devices present on networks have a far high percentage of up to date OS versions installed. Just two months ago I sampled data of a 100~ staff user wireless network and a heavily used guest network, while more than 95% of iOS devices were running the latest version of iOS 10 (the 5% was all bar one a selection of test devices kept back for legacy mobile web browser testing) where less than 25% of android devices on either network were running either the current or latest stable legacy android versions over the same 30 day period.

How is 83% of devices, and a staggering 92% of phones on the very latest OS version 'not exactly much better'?

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