To provide an even more current view of the progress of iOS 7.0.6, Chitika Insights examined overall iOS version distribution as of Tuesday, February 25. iOS 7.0.6 users now generate close to 26% of total iOS-based North American Web traffic. This represents a near 13 percentage point increase in share since our previous study period two days prior.
UPDATE (2/27/14): To provide an even more current view of the progress of iOS 7.0.6, Chitika Insights examined overall iOS version distribution as of Tuesday, February 25. The graph below shows iOS 7.0.6 users generating close to 26% of total iOS-based North American Web traffic. This represents a near 13 percentage point increase in share since our previous study period two days prior.
ORIGINAL POST (2/26/14): Apple released iOS 7.0.6 on February 21 as a security-related patch for the company’s mobile devices. By all accounts, this latest update is an urgent one for iOS users, whose encrypted communications sent using older OS versions could be intercepted, read and/or modified by outside parties. More than two full days since Apple pushed the OS fix live, 13.3% of iOS traffic is driven by the latest update.
To quantify this latest study, Chitika Insights examined tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian iOS-based online ad impressions generated within the Chitika Ad Network from February 21 through February 23, 2014. For the individual iPhone and iPad iOS version distribution snapshots, iOS-based impressions catalogued from February 23 were analyzed.
As seen in the above graph, the rate of North American iOS 7.0.6 adoption rose significantly on February 23, 2014. While not equaling the 48-hour totals following the public iOS 7 release, the steep rate of adoption is a promising sign that a majority of iOS users could be running the updated OS within the next week. Back in the summer of 2012, North American iOS traffic generated by users of another security-related iOS update, version 5.1.1, took close to three weeks to reach 58%. While not guaranteed, initial adoption figures make it reasonable to assume iOS 7.0.6 will reach that mark in a shorter amount of time.
Breaking the issue down by device, iOS 7.0.6 users generate 14.5% of total North American iOS-based Web traffic, with the majority of usage coming from iOS 7.0.4-equipped devices. In terms of major OS versions, more than 84% of iPhone Web traffic within the U.S. and Canada is driven by iOS 7 users.
Adoption rate of the latest OS is about two percentage points lower when it comes to iPads – a trend Chitika Insights has observed in the past. This extends to iOS 7 overall, where iPad adoption rates also lag by about six percentage points as compared to iPhone. This disparity could at least be partially due to the cellular connections of iPhones making it slightly more convenient for those users to download the update, as compared to the many WiFi only iPad users.
Apple’s on-device prompts for users to update their OS gives the company a leg up in swiftly and more comprehensively addressing this security issue, but as no iOS version has ever reached 100% adoption, some percentage of users are likely to remain vulnerable to this exploit.
