This post is no longer active, the latest data is available here.
On May 7, 2012 Apple released iOS 5.1.1 as an over-the-air (OTA) update. This post will continue my popular series of posts discussing the evolution of user adoption for iOS releases.
This post will present data showing how quickly users are updating to iOS 5.1.1. The data below is taken from the user base of my Audiobooks apps. Audiobooks is universal so provides data for both iPhone and iPad. The free and paid versions of Audiobooks together get nearly 100k weekly downloads so provides a statistically meaningful data set. This data reflects the active unique users each day across all devices.
Bookmark this page or follow me on Twitter if you are curious to see the data progress over time. I’ll be updating this page periodically until the numbers seem to stabilize.
#### Tuesday, May 29, 2012 Tracking the adoption of iOS 5.1.1 took an interesting turn on May 15th. On this day I released a major update to the Audiobooks. This has been generally well received and risen the total number of downloads substantially.
Interestingly, it appears that many of the new users are running older OSs, specifically flavors of iOS 4.x. Starting on launch day the proportion of users running 4.x rose from around 15% to around 25%. I don’t think this is representative of an actual increase the number of users running the older OS versions, just that as my app reaches a broader audience I’m catching more users with old devices.
I’ll continue to update this post with data over the coming weeks to see how things unfold once the anomaly of a major update gets worked out more fully.
#### Friday, May 11, 2012 To start the adoption tracking I’m going to look at the data on an hourly basis. After more than a few days this starts to become unwieldy but should be manageable for the first 4 days. The data for 4 days shows a clear and very consistent progression. Users are updating at a rate of roughly 7.5%/day, leading to a total adoption of around 30% so far.
This is very similar what was seen with iOS 5.1. The consistency across OTA releases indicates to me that users are now accustomed to performing their updates via OTA and will likely continue to do so at a quick rate going forward towards iOS 6.