iOS 8 adoption continues to climb, now stands at 81%

Apple is reporting that 81% of all active iOS devices are now using iOS 8, the company's latest mobile operating system which was released back in September last year.

iOS 8 adoption has been somewhat slower than that of its predecessor iOS 7, which, for comparison, was powering around 90% of all active iOS devices the same time last year. However, it is gradually picking up - it stood at 75% last month and 79% a couple of weeks ago.

As for the remaining iOS devices, 17% are still using iOS 7, while 2% are stuck running even older versions.

Source | Via 1 | Via 2

New iOS 8.3 beta builds go out to testers and developers

Almost two weeks ago, Apple officially unveiled its consumer-oriented beta program for iOS 8.3. At the same time, it released the first beta build for eager testers, which coincided with the third iOS 8.3 beta release for developers.

And today it's time for a new update. A new beta build of iOS 8.3 is now going out to both developers and consumers.

For developers, this is the fourth beta of the next iOS release, which might be an indication that we're headed towards the finalization of the build pretty soon. For consumers who are using the Apple Seed program, this is the second beta of iOS 8.3, which will show up for them in Software Update on their devices.

The download sizes may be different for each device, but in all cases it looks like we're seeing files above 100MB.

iOS 8.3 beta 4 for developers removes the "beta" tag from iCloud Photo Library, but this isn't the first time that this has happened - so it may be back in the future. Additionally, the message filtering feature introduced in an earlier beta has been refined somewhat, with the category for iMessages sent by people who aren't in your contact list having been renamed to "Unknown Senders".

Obviously some unnamed bug fixes and performance improvements should be in too, but that's pretty much it for new stuff in this release.

Source 1 • Source 2

Over three quarters of all compatible devices run iOS 8

More than three quarters of all compatible devices now run Apple iOS 8. As of March 16, the adoption of the Cupertino giant’s latest mobile OS has reached 77%.

Apple’s App Store Distribution dashboard reveals that iOS 7 is still booting on 20% of all the company’s active mobile hardware. The remaining 3% is reserved for iOS 6 earlier builds of the platform.

There is no information on the specific adoption of iOS 8’s various versions. Apple has pushed several major updates to the platform since its release, with iOS 8.2 last week being the latest one.

The latest data from Apple reveals that iOS 8 adoption has jumped 4% since mid-February. However, compared to iOS 7 and its 90% adoption this time last year, iOS 8 still has a way to go to catch up.

The slower adoption of iOS 8 should hardly catch anyone by surprise. The early variations of the OS carried a number of bugs, which slowed down the upgrade cycle. Apple will reportedly focus mostly on performance and stability upgrades for its next major release of the platform - iOS 9.

However, compared to the adoption of the latest Android version by Google, Apple is doing a lot better. As of early March, Android 5.0 Lollipop runs on 3.3% of all hardware.

Source | Via