iOS 8 Adoption at 46% After Five Days | Hacker News Reader

iOS 8 Adoption at 46% After Five Days

techcrunch.com

21 pointsdownandout28 comments

Whatever your personal thoughts are on iOS and Apple, you can't deny that it's amazing how fast Apple can push through new updates which is a good thing for both developers who can rely on a larger userbase for new APIs and security.

Even more amazing to me is the high rate of adoption given how massive the download (~4GB) was. I had to clean up apps from my 64GB ipad to make room (though with 64GB, I tend to carelessly collect apps, and Amazon Instant video will just download tens of GB if I'm not careful). Anecdotally, I can think of a couple friends this past month in which, on a normal day, had to stop taking pictures/selfies because their phone HD was too full...It's easy enough to delete GB of movies, but photos?

It doesn't help that deleting media/apps just from the phone is a pain in the ass, and syncing with iTunes is arcane even to a longtime iOS/Apple user as myself. So I have to imagine this 46% are the folks who happen to have well-maintained disk space...but 4GB won't be trivial for people with 16GB phones that have collected music/photos/video for a couple years now.

I installed iTunes over the weekend (I don't own a Mac) just to perform the update. It was fairly quick and painless, and saved me from needing to delete a ton of stuff from my 16GB iPhone, which I foolishly did for the iOS 7 update. I uninstalled iTunes as soon as it was complete.

Is it really that difficult to use iTunes? There are some tricky things to take note related to overriding data if you are not already using iTunes to sync stuff but it's amazingly seamless once you get that in place.

The software is crap on Windows (because of the whole compat layer) but it works pretty well on OS X IMO.

You can just use iTunes to do the OS upgrade, and bypass the subsequent sync process. It will save you having to free up much space on our iPhone - IIRC, it takes only 1.5GB free space.

I'm really surprised, it seems pretty much on track with iOS7, that was 58% after 7 days [1].

I thought that the space requirement would slow down adoption (I still have to change because of that).

[1] http://9to5mac.com/2013/09/26/ios-7-adoption-rate-much-highe...

By contrast...

https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

I sold an iPhone not long ago, one that still had iOS 6. Seems that it sold at a bit of a premium, and that was the likely reason.

Funnily enough, one market for those is people who want them for testing; iOS6 in particular is a problem, because the only device that got left on it was the 3GS.

iPod Touch 4th gen also tops out at iOS 6.

Yeah, this was an iPhone 4.

I suspect that there are quite a few people like myself who are waiting for a jailbreak to be released before upgrading.

I thought that you couldn't use the App Store if you jail broke your phone? That's how Apple gets it statistics.

i feel the ios 8 is still a bit buggy!!

Maybe, but the Apple Wave feature alone is worth upgrading! http://i.imgur.com/TX9dbK6.jpg

Just in case someone doesn't realize it, "Wave" is a joke/troll...

Sometimes my custom keyboard disappears (using SwiftType). Numeric unlock in Cloud Magic doesn't work; I have to close and reopen. I have 2 apps with swipeable photo-galleries that get "stuck" and cant' swipe (one of which has released a big iOS 8 update and still has behavior). (These may be app issues, not OS necessarily, but that's mostly irrelevant)

Exact same here, I'm using Fleksy keyboard app and it sometimes just disappears; and Redditur's swipable photo gallery gets stuck.

It's very buggy. I installed the GM and fully expected a second GM because of all the bugs I saw. But nope, they shipped it.

Maybe it's just me, but 'adoption' sounds like a purely voluntary action. Don't mean to sound negative, but is there a word with less negative connotation than 'infection'?

Why do you believe ios8 is being forced on people?

In the interest of accuracy, iOS 8 is being forced on people through programs that require iOS 8. However, the historical trend has been to support up to two versions behind unless the program relies on something that is not available in the older versions.

No, people are choosing to upgrade to ios8 if it is required by the applications that they chose to run.

They could also choose to run comparable software that does not require ios8 and not upgrade at all.

You do have a choice, but it's between an OS with unpatched vulnerabilities and iOS 8. If you care a little about security, you're forced to upgrade. Attackers don't necessarily need much time to compare the two versions and understand the vulnerabilities that were fixed.

It's not about Apple being evil, it's the nature of computer security today. However they could backport security fixes, if they wanted to leave a period of time where people have a meaningful choice between freshness and stability.

It looks like Apple supports IOS releases with the same frequency as OS X, that being n-1. IOS6 probably won't be getting any more patches, but IOS7 should be for the next year or so.

So even patching is not forcing anyone.

According to http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222 the last time version n-1 was updated for a security vulnerability was 6.1.6, and it was updated at the same time as version n.

There's no iOS 7.1.3 that would fix any of the many vulnerabilities fixed in iOS 8: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6441 , and it's likely there won't ever be.

For example, CVE-2014-4377 ("Opening a maliciously crafted PDF file may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution") or any of the WebKit vulnerabilities are a pretty big deal.

Full version upgrades always prompt the user.

At this point, I don't think it has even started prompting; these will be people who either knew iOS8 was available, or saw the little '1' on the settings app. Apple doesn't do mandatory updates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com