Just under a month ago, Apple released the latest major update to its mobile operating system - iOS 12 - introducing big performance improvements as well as a handful of new features such as Screen Time and Siri Shortcuts. But despite being less than 30 days old, iOS 12 already has already surged past its predecessors to become the most commonly installed iteration at the present time.
The information comes from Apple itself, which collected the data through the App Store on October 10. iOS 12 is already on half of all active devices, but it"s even more popular on the more recent ones. For products launched in the last four years, iOS 12 has already taken 53% of the market share. The latest version of Apple"s mobile operating system has the widest reach of any update it has released in the past, supporting every device that received iOS 11 last year, which probably helps make its adoption even faster.
More interestingly, this paints a stark contrast with what"s happening on Google"s side of the fence. The latest available data from the Mountain View company doesn"t even include figures for the Android Pie release which began rolling out to Pixel devices in August, and even last year"s Oreo is on just 19.2% of devices as of September 28. While it"s interesting to note such a massive difference, it"s not surprising by any means - Android is on thousands of devices from a wide variety of manufacturers, and Google doesn"t control how often each of them gets updated. Project Treble was supposed to help reduce this discrepancy, but it seems it hasn"t had the desired effect yet.
iOS 12 is set to receive a minor update sometime soon, introducing new emoji and group FaceTime calls. It also recently received an even smaller update to address charging and Wi-Fi issues.