As measured by the App store.
I would be surprised if the general population is the same distribution. People who go often to the app store probably update more often.
Still for developers it is a relevant number.
I would be surprised if the general population is the same distribution. People who go often to the app store probably update more often.
Still for developers it is a relevant number.
Regardless, we can be relatively sure that that graph is there to help developers when deciding which versions of iOS they should support. It would not be surprising if Apple decided simply to include only active App Store shoppers, because this is the number that actually interests developers.
(i) I'm not actually sure if this is true if you have never installed an app from the App Store - there is maybe an exception where these phones don't check for updates in this case.
https://mixpanel.com/trends/#report/ios_frag
http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/
http://stats.unity3d.com/mobile/index-ios.html
David Smith's numbers throw a few more percentage points to iOS 5, but he's a smaller sample size and his stats are two weeks old. Unity is similar, but it looks from the UI that their data is generated monthly.
Mixpanel's are the most up-to-date and their numbers mirror Apple's.
I just noticed this at the bottom of Mixpanel's graph:
THIS REPORT WAS GENERATED FROM 79,977,999,480 RECORDS.
Honestly, though: even correcting for this new-device bias, this still isn't what you care about... normal users don't sit around browsing the App Store or the Android Market... they open the app when they are interested in a specific download because of some external sale having occurred. Your market as a developer are "people with a device", not "people weird enough to try searching on their device".
Regardless, though, yeah: the reason Apple is showing this statistic is because it is the identical metric reported by Google, and they were making a big deal about these numbers during the WWDC keynote, even to the extent of pointing out that Google had changed the metric in this way (to Market visits) was cheating... comparing, though, the like metrics isn't that bad.
How do you know that’s how Apple measures OS version share? Why would Apple limit itself to only measuring when users open the App Store?
Any iOS device that ever connects to the Internet checks in with Apple to be activated and registered. After that, iOS regularly checks for OS and app updates. If I own an iOS device that I never update and never visit the App Store on, that device will still check for updates and will transmit version data to Apple. Also, because every iOS device has a unique ID, more active users won‘t be counted double.
Don't know where you got your misinformation.