Apple released the latest generation of its mobile operating system on October 12, and in only five days iOS 5 accounted for 20 percent of all web traffic on iOS devices. Chitika insights monitored web traffic on iOS based devices from October 11 through October 17 and have watched the use of iOS 5 sky rocket.
We have outlined several reasons why an iOS user would want to update their software, so it really is not a big surprise that people are updating their devices. The shock is just how quickly people are adopting the new system. Of course selling 4 million new iPhone 4S units in the first weekend it was available clearly helped spike the iOS 5 traffic. In only five days iOS 5 became the second most popular version of iOS, second only to iOS 4.
After seeing this data it we can’t help but be reminded of the fragmentation problem that Google’s Android suffer from. One of the draws of Android is the fact that users have the freedom of choice when buying an Android phone. They are able to decide the form factor, manfacuer, and carrier. One of the big draw backs of this system is that when Google issues a software update, for example Ice Cream Sandwich, the update takes some time to reach the users.
It is truly impressive how quickly iOS users have adopted the new version of the software. Even with frustrating installation issues couldn’t slow down all the early adopters. We will be following iOS usage, and will see just how quickly iOS 5 becomes the most popular version of iOS.
