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Comment by sparkiegeek | Hacker News Reader

Would be interesting to see a comparison to iOS - are there figures available?

Marco Arment does it pretty regularly: http://www.marco.org/2011/11/30/more-ios-device-and-os-versi...

And it's also worth mentioning that Instapaper will require iOS 5.0 beginning next update. His active users' OS adoption rate is really astonishing.

The critical difference is once a new version of iOS is released Apple stop distributing the old one (with a slight exception when the iPad first came out, and was on 3.2).

Only today Samsung have announced some new handsets at MWC that still run Gingerbread...

> The critical difference is once a new version of iOS is released Apple stop distributing the old one

and all supported devices can get the update on release day by clicking a button.

The problem with these comparisons is that people take the rollout date of the end user operating system iOS and compare it to the first release date of the first OS based on a new version of Android.

Since iOS has no cross platform component similar to Android, it would make more sense to compare it to Google's Nexus OS or to Samsung's Galaxy OS.

I think the term "operating system" is so generic that it confuses a lot of people in these discussions. To many people and most tech journalists, the operating system is all software in a device before you install additional software. And by this definition, Android is not an operating system.

The best I know of are from single developers, not global:

http://www.quora.com/What-proportion-of-all-iPhone-owners-us...

http://www.marco.org/2011/11/30/more-ios-device-and-os-versi...

for reference, iOS 5 was released October 12, Ice Cream Sandwich on October 19.

Huh? ICS was announced on October 19th, not released. The first release didn't come until mid-November, when the GSM Galaxy Nexus went on sale.

my bad, I checked Wikipedia and got deceived by the phrase “[…] officially launched at the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich release event on 19 October 2011” but then it says only the SDK was released that day. so, one month difference instead of one week.

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